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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barker, David C. (David Christopher), 1969– editor. | Suhay, Elizabeth, editor.
Title: The politics of truth in polarized America / [edited by] David C. Barker and Elizabeth Suhay.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021015173 (print) | LCCN 2021015174 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197578384 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197578407 (epub) | ISBN 9780197578414 (online)
Subjects: LCSH: Political culture—United States. | Belief and doubt--Political aspects. | Political science—Philosophy. | Polarization (Social sciences)—United States. | Social conflict—United States. | United States—Politics and government—2017–Classification: LCC JK1726 .P65175 2021 (print) | LCC JK1726 (ebook) | DDC 306.20973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015173
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015174
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197578384.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Contributors vii
Notes on Contributors ix
The Politics of Truth in Polarized America: Contexts, Concepts, Causes, and Correctives 1
Elizabeth Suhay, David C. Barker, and Ryan DeTamble
PART I CONTEXT AND CONCEPTS
1. Neither Dogmatism Nor Relativism: Lessons from the Politics of Truth in Western Philosophy 17 Alan Levine
2. Lies, Damned Lies, and American Democracy 38
Robert Y. Shapiro
3. The Social Function of News and (Mis)Information Use 63
Benjamin Toff
4. The Expressive Value of Answering Survey Questions
Matthew H. Graham and Gregory A. Huber
83
5. American Hubris: The Politics of Unwarranted Epistemic Certitude in the United States 113
David C. Barker, Morgan Marietta, and Ryan DeTamble
PART II CAUSES
6. The Evolutionary Psychology of Conflict and the Functions of Falsehood 131
Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and John Tooby
7. Political Subgroups, Knowledge, and Information: Gun Issues and Gun Ownership 152
Donald Haider-Markel, Abigail Vegter, and Patrick Gauding
8. Value Projection and the Marketplace of Realities 177
David C. Barker and Morgan Marietta
9. Conspiracy Theories and Political Identities 200
Adam M. Enders and Joseph E. Uscinski
10. Conspiracy Stress or Relief? Learned Helplessness and Conspiratorial Thinking
Christina E. Farhart, Joanne M. Miller, and Kyle L. Saunders
PART III CORRECTIVES
11. Opinion Formation in Light of the Facts: How Correcting Mistaken Beliefs about Income Inequality Affects Public Support for Redistribution
Cheryl Boudreau and Scott A. MacKenzie
12. Can Facts Change Minds? The Case of Free Trade
Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood
13. Do Facts Change Public Attitudes toward Fiscal Policy?
John Sides
14. Authoritarianism, Fact-Checking, and Citizens’ Response to Presidential Election Information
Amanda L. Wintersieck
15. Combatting the Anti-Muslim Rhetoric of the 2016 Presidential Campaign: An Experimental Investigation of the Impact of Corrective News
Kim Fridkin and Jillian Courey
16. Citizen Deliberation as a Correction: The Role of Deliberative Mini-Publics in Addressing Political Misperceptions
Justin Reedy, Chris Anderson, and Paola Conte
17. Intuitive Politics and Why Thinking Isn’t Guaranteed to Save Us
Kevin Arceneaux and Ryan J. Vander Wielen
Contributors
Chris Anderson Doctoral Student University of Oklahoma
Kevin Arceneaux Professor Center for Political Research at Sciences Po Paris
David C. Barker Professor American University
Cheryl Boudreau Professor University of California, Davis
Paola Conte Doctoral Student University of Oklahoma
Jillian Courey PhD Candidate Arizona State University
Ryan DeTamble Doctoral Student American University
Adam M. Enders
Assistant Professor University of Louisville
Christina E. Farhart
Assistant Professor Carleton College
Kim Fridkin Professor
Arizona State University
Patrick Gauding PhD Candidate University of Kansas
Matthew H. Graham Postdoctoral Research Scientist George Washington University
Donald Haider-Markel Professor University of Kansas
Gregory A. Huber Professor Yale University
Alan Levine Associate Professor American University
Scott A. MacKenzie
Associate Professor University of California, Davis
Morgan Marietta Associate Professor University of Massachusetts Lowell
Joanne M. Miller
Associate Professor University of Delaware
Mathias Osmundsen
Assistant Professor Aarhus University
Michael Bang Petersen Professor Aarhus University
Contributors
Ethan Porter
Assistant Professor
George Washington University
Justin Reedy
Associate Professor
University of Oklahoma
Kyle L. Saunders Professor
Colorado State University
Robert Y. Shapiro Professor Columbia University
John Sides Professor
Vanderbilt University
Elizabeth Suhay Associate Professor American University
Benjamin Toff Senior Research Fellow University of Oxford
John Tooby Professor University of California, Santa Barbara
Joseph E. Uscinski Associate Professor University of Miami
Ryan J. Vander Wielen Associate Professor Stonybrook University
Abigail Vegter Doctoral Candidate University of Kansas
Amanda L. Wintersieck Assistant Professor Virginia Commonwealth University
Thomas J. Wood Assistant Professor The Ohio State University
Notes on Contributors
Chris Anderson is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on how persuasive messages and other interventions increase participation in political, educational, and other contexts. This research meets at the confluence of political communication, social influence, and public opinion.
Kevin Arceneaux is Professor of Political Science in the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po Paris. He studies political communication, political psychology, and political behavior, focusing on the interaction between political messages and people's political predispositions. His recent book, Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability (2017, Cambridge University Press, coauthored with Ryan Vander Wielen) won the Robert E. Lane Award from the American Political Science Association Political Psychology section and was named a cowinner of the Best Book Award from the APSA Experimental Research section.
David C. Barker is Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. He studies American politics, public opinion, and political psychology, with a particular focus on the dynamics of political polarization. He is the author or coauthor of three university press books: Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior (2002; Columbia University Press), Representing Red and Blue: How the Culture Wars Change the Way Citizens Speak and Politicians Listen (2012; Oxford University Press) and One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (2019; Oxford University Press). His work has also appeared in American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly and many other peer-reviewed outlets. He has served as principal investigator on externally funded research projects totaling more than $16 million, which include support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Hewlett Foundation, and many others.
Cheryl Boudreau is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. Her research examines whether and when various types of political information help uninformed voters to make political decisions that improve their welfare. This information may come from trusted endorsers, voter guides, public opinion polls, politicians competing in a debate, or discussions with fellow citizens. Using laboratory and survey experiments, as well as observational studies, Boudreau’s research sheds light on when these various types of information help uninformed voters to behave as though they are more informed. She is the author of more than two dozen scientific research articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political
Behavior, Political Communication, and Political Research Quarterly. She also serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Experimental Political Science.
Paola Conte is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma. She received an Master’s in Public Administration from University of Miami and a Master of Arts degree in foreign languages from University of Padua (Italy). Her research interests hinge on innovation and organizational learning in for-profit organizations.
Jillian Courey is PhD candidate at Arizona State University. Her research interests include political psychology and American Politics.
Ryan DeTamble is a PhD student at American University. His research focuses on questions of American political behavior, especially those related to public opinion, certainty, partisanship, and polarization. He has previously worked as an Editorial Assistant for the American Journal of Political Science. Prior to his time at American University, Ryan was a Chancellor’s Scholar at Texas Christian University.
Adam M. Enders is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, where he studies conspiracy theories, misinformation, and political polarization. Dr. Enders has published many peer-reviewed articles in outlets such as the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Political Behavior, in addition to essays appearing in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
Christina E. Farhart is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Carleton College. Her work utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to study the causes and consequences of political attitudes and mass behavior. More specifically, she studies learned helplessness and political disaffection as explanations for consequential political attitudes and beliefs, as well as the use of alternative methodologies such as implicit candidate evaluations. She and her coauthors are working on projects related to the political and psychological explanations for conspiracy endorsement and misinformed belief. This work received the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for the best paper presented in the Political Communication section of the American Political Science Association (co-authored with Joanne M. Miller and Kyle L. Saunders). She has published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Political Science, Political Psychology, Electoral Studies, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Politics and Gender, and Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy. Her work has also been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Vox, The Atlantic, and National Public Radio, among other outlets.
Kim Fridkin is Foundation Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University. She has authored or coauthored five books, including Taking Aim at Attack Advertising: Understanding the Impact of Negative Campaigning in U.S. Senate Races (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Changing Face of Representation: The Gender of U.S. Senators and Constituent Communications (University of Michigan Press, 2014), No Holds Barred: Negative Campaigning in the U.S. Senate (Prentice Hall, Inc., 2004), The Spectacle of U.S. Senate Campaigns (Princeton University Press, 1999), and The Political Consequences
of Being a Woman (Columbia University Press, 1996). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. She is the Director of the School of Politics and Global Studies Experimental Laboratory at Arizona State University. Her research interests include political communication, women and politics, and senate elections.
Patrick Gauding is PhD candidate in political science at the University of Kansas. His research interests in American politics and public policy include criminal justice policy and gun politics.
Matthew H. Graham is Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Yale University in 2020. His research examines how political polarization acts as an obstacle to effective democratic accountability. His dissertation project, Mismeasuring Misperceptions: How Surveys Distort the Nature of Partisan Belief Differences, shows that partisan differences in factual beliefs are smaller and less dependent on misperceptions than is evident in face-value interpretations of survey data.
Donald Haider-Markel is Professor and Chair of Political Science at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching is focused on the representation of interests in the policy process and the dynamics between public opinion, political behavior, and public policy. He has more than twenty years of experience in survey research, interviews, and policy studies.
Gregory A. Huber is the Forst Family Professor and Chair of Political Science at Yale University, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of American Politics, Resident Fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and Associate Editor of Quarterly Journal of Political Science. Huber’s research focuses on American Politics and is motivated by a desire to understand how individuals think about the government, how these attitudes are shaped by government action and political campaigns, and how those beliefs, in turn, shape citizens’ political activities and government policy. He draws on multiple methodologies, including field interviews, formal modeling, survey and administrative records analysis, and field, lab, and quasiexperiments. He is the author of the book, The Craft of Bureaucratic Neutrality (Cambridge, 2007) and over fifty peerreviewed articles. Huber has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, most recently a National Science Foundation grant on the topic of how individuals assess legitimate authority.
Alan Levine is Associate Professor of Government and Director of the Political Theory Institute at American University. He is the author of Sensual Philosophy: Toleration, Skepticism, and Montaigne’s Politics of the Self (2001), editor of Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration (1999), and coeditor of A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (2011 with Daniel Malachuk) and The Political Thought of the Civil War (2018 with Thomas Merrill and James Stoner). He is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University, and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
Scott A. MacKenzie is Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses broadly on American politics with specific interests in legislative institutions and decision-making, subnational political institutions and policy-making, and voting behavior and representation in low-information elections. He is coauthor of Paradise Plundered, winner of the Best Book Award for the best book published on urban politics in 2011 from the urban politics section of the American Political Science Association. His is the author of more than a dozen scientific research articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, Election Law Journal, Journal of Politics, Journal of Urban Affairs, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Review.
Morgan Marietta is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches political psychology and constitutional politics. His research focuses on the political consequences of belief. He is the author of four books, The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Influence, A Citizen’s Guide to American Ideology: Conservatism and Liberalism in Contemporary Politics, A Citizen’s Guide to the Constitution and the Supreme Court: Constitutional Conflict in American Politics, and most recently One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (with David C. Barker). He is the editor of the annual SCOTUS series at Palgrave Macmillan on the major decisions of the Supreme Court and co-editor (along with Bert Rockman) of the Citizen Guides to Politics & Public Affairs.
Joanne M. Miller is Associate Professor of Political Science & International Relations and Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. Her work, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, centers on the psychological underpinnings of political attitudes and mass behavior. She is the recipient of three best paper awards from the American Political Science Association, including the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for the best paper delivered on a Political Communication panel (for her coauthored paper [with Kyle L. Saunders and Christina E. Farhart] titled “Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Moderating Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust”). She has published articles in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, and Public Opinion Quarterly Her most recent research, on the antecedents of conspiracy beliefs, has been featured in national and regional outlets such as The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, National Public Radio, The Pacific Standard, and The Guardian
Mathias Osmundsen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. His work focuses on the psychology of political communication. His PhD focused on how the negativity bias shapes the processing of political information and his postdoctoral work focuses on the psychology underlying the sharing of “fake news” on social media. This research, financed by both public and private foundations, has been published in Political Psychology, Social Cognition, Frontiers in Psychology. His most
recent work, on the psychology underlying “fake news,” has been featured in The New York Times, Salon Magazine, and National Public Radio.
Michael Bang Petersen is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. His work focuses on the evolutionary psychology of political attitudes and has received funding from several private and public foundations. He has received the Erik Erikson Early Career Award for his contributions to political psychology and is an appointed member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. His work has been published in, among other journals, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Psychological Science. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, Salon, The Economist, and National Public Radio.
Ethan Porter is Assistant Professor at George Washington University. He holds appointments in the School of Media and Public Affairs and the Political Science Department and is the Cluster Lead of the Misinformation/Disinformation Lab at GW’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics. False Alarm: The Truth About Political Mistruths in the Trump Era, a book coauthored with Thomas J. Wood, was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press. His second book, The Consumer Citizen, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Justin Reedy is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and a research associate in the Center for Risk & Crisis Management at the University of Oklahoma. He studies political communication and deliberation, mass and digital media, and group communication. In particular, his research focuses on how groups of people make political and civic decisions in face-to-face and online settings; how public opinion on political, scientific, and technical issues is formed; and how people and policymakers can come together to deliberate and make better decisions on public policy issues that involve significant societal and personal risk.
Kyle L. Saunders is Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University. Saunders’s research, which has been funded by multiple organizations including the National Science Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, includes work on the determinants of political attitudes and behaviors and their effects on political polarization. Saunders’ research can be found in some of the field’s best peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and Comparative Political Studies, as well as in many other outlets. Saunders’ most recent research on the antecedents of conspiracy beliefs has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, National Public Radio, and other national and regional outlets.
Robert Y. Shapiro is the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is currently the President of the Academy of Political Science and Editor of its journal, Political Science Quarterly. He specializes in American politics with research and teaching interests in public opinion, policymaking, political leadership, the mass media, and applications of statistical methods. He is
coauthor of The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (with Benjamin Page, University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (with Lawrence Jacobs, University of Chicago Press, 2000). His most recent books are The Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media (edited with Lawrence R. Jacobs, Oxford University Press, 2011), Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion (with Brigitte L. Nacos and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, University of Chicago Press, 2011), and Presidential Selection and Democracy (coedited with Demetrios James Caraley, Academy of Political Science, 2019). He is also coauthor or coeditor of several other books and has published numerous articles in major academic journals. Shapiro served for many years as editor of Public Opinion Quarterly’s “The Polls-Trends” section, and is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.
John Sides is Professor of Political Science and William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair at Vanderbilt University. He studies political behavior in American and comparative politics. He is an author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and The Battle for the Meaning of America and other research.
Elizabeth Suhay is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Government, and a Fellow at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. Suhay specializes in the study of public opinion, political psychology, and political communication. Her current research rests at the intersection of politics, knowledge, and inequality. She is interested in how and why many topics, ranging from climate change to explanations for socioeconomic inequality, have become so politicized in recent years and how experts, science communicators, and policymakers can work together to ensure quality evidence informs the policymaking process. Suhay is the author of numerous scholarly articles, with her research appearing in The American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior, and Political Psychology, among other journals, and she is the co-editor of two prior edited works, The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion (with Bernard Grofman and Alexander Trechsel) and the “The Politics of Science” issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (with James Druckman). Suhay’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Benjamin Toff (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford where he leads a multimethod, comparative project examining the drivers of trust in news across Brazil, India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is also Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota.
John Tooby is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is best known for his work in pioneering the new field of evolutionary psychology. He has published in journals within cognitive psychology, evolutionary
biology, cultural and biological anthropology, genetics and economics, including in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society, and American Economic Review. He has won a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, received J. S. Guggenheim Fellowships, and has served as President of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. His work has been featured by multiple major news magazines.
Joseph E. Uscinski is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami College of Arts & Sciences, where he teaches courses on public opinion and conspiracy theories. Dr. Uscinski is coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories with Joseph M. Parent (Oxford University Press, 2014) and editor of Conspiracy Theories & the People Who Believe Them (Oxford University Press, 2014). His essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Reason Magazine, among many other outlets.
Ryan J. Vander Wielen is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University. His research examines how legislators strategically navigate their electoral circumstances, and whether voters hold elected representatives accountable for their behavior in office. His recent book, Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability (2017, Cambridge University Press, coauthored with Kevin Arceneaux) won the Robert E. Lane Award from the American Political Science Association Political Psychology section and was named a cowinner of the Best Book Award from the APSA Experimental Research section.
Abigail Vegter is a political science doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, concentrating in the subfields of American politics and public policy with a minor in research methodology. She maintains an active research agenda focusing on religion and politics, primarily investigating the relationship between religion and gun ownership in the United States.
Amanda L. Wintersieck is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research interests lie in political behavior and political communication. Specifically, she is interested in the effects of political campaigns on voters’ evaluations of candidates, on the role the media plays in citizens’ vote choice, and the conditions that advantage a candidate’s campaign. Her current research focuses on the role of news media and the impact of the electoral context in political campaigns. She pursues these interests utilizing a multi-methodological approach, including experiments, surveys, and content analysis. Her work has appeared in Political Communication, American Politics Research, Politics, Groups, & Identities, HKS Misinformation Review, and The London School of Economics American Politics and Policy Blog.
Thomas J. Wood is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, where he studies public opinion and voting behavior. He has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior, and elsewhere. His first book, Enchanted America (coauthored with Eric Oliver), was published at University of Chicago Press in 2018.
The Politics of Truth in Polarized America
Contexts, Concepts, Causes, and Correctives
Elizabeth Suhay, David C. Barker, and Ryan DeTamble
Democratic governance rests on the assumption that citizens know what is true. A shared understanding of reality is critical to making sound decisions, both at the ballot box and in our political institutions. If that assumption is wrong—that is, if peoples’ minds are filled with misinformation and “alternative facts”—then citizens will have difficulty casting votes that reflect their interests and values and holding leaders accountable. Likewise, if truth often gives way to “truthiness” (Colbert 2005) in public discourse, then the mythical “marketplace of ideas” may, in fact, be more of an ideational flea market. Instead of the best ideas rising to the top through vigorous but reasonable deliberation, the loudest and cheapest points of view are most likely to prevail.
As it turns out, the premise that most Americans1 have a firm grasp of politically relevant facts is incorrect (e.g., Barabas et al. 2014; Barabas and Jerit 2009; Bartels 1996; Boudreau 2013; Dancey and Sheagley 2013; Delli-Carpini and Keeter 1996; Gilens 2001; Jerit and Barabas 2012, 2017; Jerit, Barabas, and Bolsen 2006; see also Althaus 1998). Making matters worse, their perceptions of the world often are biased by various forms of “motivated reasoning” (Ditto et al. 1998; Edwards and Smith 1996; Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler 2017; Kunda 1990; Molden and Higgins 2005, Taber and Lodge 2006, 2013), which often leads to confident wrongheadedness (Hochschild and Einstein 2015; Hofstetter and Barker 1999; Kuklinski et al. 2000; Southwell and Thorson 2015; Southwell, Thorson, and Sheble 2018; Swire et al. 2017) and interpersonal contempt (Marietta and Barker 2019).
But none of this should be surprising. Scholars of politics have rendered such judgments for at least a century (Lippmann 1922; Campbell, Converse,
1 This volume focuses mainly on the U.S. case, although its conclusions will be relevant to other democratic nations.
Miller, and Stokes 1960). The nation’s Founders even had their doubts about the typical person’s intellectual capabilities and judgment (e.g., Hamilton 1787; Sherman 1787), and James Madison famously worried over people’s self-interest and passions (Madison 1787). Indeed, in large part due to their concerns about human nature, the Founders built representative political institutions not only with numerous checks and balances in place but also with limited citizen involvement. Intriguingly, however, as the country became more democratic during the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth (e.g., the direct election of Senators, the gradual expansion of suffrage, the introduction of presidential primary elections), the nation on balance grew more prosperous and stable.
Many scholars have sought to square the circle of insufficient political knowledge among citizens and a relatively well-functional representative democracy by arguing in favor of coordinated elite influence (e.g., Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller 2008) and savvy knowledge shortcuts (e.g., Lupia 1994; Popkin 1994). Yet, however well these and other workarounds bolstered good governance in the past, they seem to be faltering today. One likely contributor is not ignorance or bias per se but, rather, deep disagreement between partisans and other groups over factual matters, ranging from the existence of anthropogenic climate change to discrimination against non-white Americans. The truth has become so politicized that we cannot even agree on whether the spread of COVID-19 can be slowed by wearing a mask or if the contagion that has killed over 500,000 Americans at the time of this writing is a serious health threat (Huang 2021; Lewis 2020; Rojas 2020)—a state of bewilderment that has likely contributed to the distressingly impotent U.S. response to the pandemic (Lawler 2020). The nation’s disagreements over a range of topics have become so severe that we have recently witnessed a sharp uptick in violence with political roots (Allam 2020; Craig 2020; O’Harrow 2021).
Why have circumstances deteriorated so? It is unlikely that human nature has changed. Rather, circumstances have. Over time, not only have the nation’s political institutions become more democratic, its sources of information have, too. Whereas throughout most of the twentieth century, citizens shared exposure to a handful of professional news outlets that catered to a mass audience and therefore tried diligently to adhere to norms of objective reporting, the last thirty years or so have seen a steady move toward an increasingly decentralized and fragmented media environment, in which “narrowcasting”—or the catering to particular segments of the electorate—is paramount (Metzger 2017). The perspective-driven (Arceneaux and Johnson 2013), the sensational (Hendriks-Vettehen and Kleemans 2018), the negative (Trussler and Soroka 2014), the subjective (Kavanaugh et al. 2019) and, yes, the untrue (Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral 2018) are all incentivized and rewarded with attention, ratings, and profits.
These changes have, in turn, led to a precipitous decline in Americans’ trust in the media. In a 2019 Gallup poll, only 15% of Republicans expressed trust in the mainstream news media, which is less than one quarter the number of Democratic respondents who trust the media (Brenan 2019). This uniquely partisan lack of trust may be due to antimainstream media elite cues (Ladd and Podkul 2020), media bias (Groseclose and Milyo 2005), a combination of the two, and/or some other factor, but it motivates a huge segment of the American population to seek out nontraditional and often partisan sources of information—including in some cases an almost exclusive reliance on social media echo chambers (Barberá et al. 2015). In such a confusing and muddy information environment, even the most earnest and independent individuals will have difficulty sorting out true from false.
Adding fuel to the fire is the intensification of political competition (Lee 2016) and cultural realignments (e.g., Barker and Carman 2012; Layman 2001) that have led to partisan tribes that are much more distinct and homogenous with respect to just about every demographic and value divide that one can name: race, gender, religion, age, education, geography, and of course ideology (e.g., Mason 2018). As several of the authors in this volume discuss, the salience of partisan and social identities further degrades our ability to perceive the world as others do. Not only are these identities associated with distinct values and worldviews, but the combination of these things can cause intense distrust of those with differing identities and views. This distrust further decreases the likelihood that we will correct our blind spots by listening to the other side in an open-minded way.
The recent march toward what some call “post-truth” politics has been gradual, but it most likely reached its peak during the Trump administration. President Trump was unique—at least in high level U.S. politics—in two important ways: He had little regard for the truth in his public statements (Leonhardt and Thompson 2017), making it even more difficult for the lay person to tell true from false, and he disparaged and undermined traditional information sources (Ladd and Podkul 2020). This said, while Trump did—and continues to— exacerbate the problem, his election was in part a consequence of existing truth decay. The problem was building long before Trump came onto the scene, and it will still be here after he is gone.
In response to this unnerving state of affairs, the scholarly literature on misinformation, conspiracy theories, “dueling fact perceptions,” and the like has exploded in recent years (e.g., Berinsky 2017; Hochschild and Einstein 2015; Jerit and Zhao 2020; Marietta and Barker 2019; Scheufele and Krause 2019; Southwell, Thorson, and Sheble 2018; Uscinski 2020). It is at this inflexion point that the scholarship published herewith enters. This volume grows out of a conference that we organized in the spring of 2018, at American University’s Center
for Congressional and Presidential Studies. With support from the National Science Foundation, the conference brought together over fifty national experts from academia and journalism. The authors in this volume seek to understand this current moment, citizens’ susceptibility to believing ideas with little demonstrable basis in fact, the consequences of these tendencies, and what we might do about it.
The volume begins by situating the problem of misinformation and disagreement over what is true in historical and contemporary contexts and by introducing novel concepts and theoretical frameworks. Next, the volume explores the psychological causes of polarized beliefs and conspiracy theories. The authors in this section move beyond the widely discussed topic of partisan tribalism to the influence of other social identities, value projection, personality characteristics, and evolutionarily shaped psychological motivations. Finally, an industry has emerged of reformers who propose various correctives to our current information environment. Authors in the last section score the usefulness of some of these initiatives, particularly fact-checking. The concluding chapter weaves together the volume’s multiple themes—arguing that error-prone human intuitions drive political choices but that some of their negative effects can be ameliorated via new institutional designs, such as ranked-choice voting. With these contributions, we hope The Politics of Truth in Polarized America fosters a shared understanding of what is known about this critical topic as well as what remains to be discovered.
Part I: Context and Concepts
The first section of the volume examines the politics of truth through a wide lens. Authors draw from philosophical, historical, social scientific, and methodological traditions to offer novel perspectives on truth, lying, misinformation, and epistemic hubris.
In Chapter 1, “Neither Dogmatism Nor Relativism: Lessons from the Politics of Truth in Western Philosophy,” Alan Levine provides a chronological road map to our disharmonious present moment while also complicating our understanding of “the politics of truth.” His essay traces major conceptions of truth in Western philosophy from Socratic skepticism and medieval faith to enlightenment optimism and postmodern rejection, arguing that aspects of all these belief traditions are alive and kicking, forming in our polity a kind of “metaphysical pluralism.” To navigate our current pluralist or fractured conceptions of truth, Levine argues that we should strive to avoid both excessive dogmatism and relativism. If one thinks one possesses the truth, the “other” is demonized and compromise seems immoral. Similarly, the view that there is no truth can
become a self-serving cloak for complacency and a willful disregard of the value of engaging with different views. Both dogmatism and relativism undermine incentives to question one’s own views. We always need, especially in times of fiercely competing factions, to examine our presuppositions and cultivate a proper understanding of our abilities and the limits of politics. A better understanding of these difficulties can help us avoid parochial and simplistic answers to our current problems.
In Chapter 2, “Lies, Damned Lies, and American Democracy,” Robert Shapiro documents the rising tide of dishonesty in American politics and its democratic consequences. Lying is certainly not a new feature of American politics, but the visibility and blatant use of such dishonesty by political elites appears to have reached new heights in recent times. Shapiro discusses the history of such conduct, including a pattern of deceit in recent presidential administrations, as well as the reasons for the rise of “damned lies” and their damaging effects. He then asks whether the traditional mechanisms and institutions in place in American society are up to the challenge of fighting this truth war. Ultimately, Shapiro points to the importance of an information environment in which the media embraces its “watchdog” role and government officials and experts resist and stall damned lies.
In Chapter 3, “The Social Function of News and (Mis)Information Use,” Benjamin Toff warns that too much research on misinformation is being produced in disciplinary silos. Synthesizing scholarship from the fields of political psychology, journalism studies, and communications, Toff proposes a new framework for thinking about research on misinformation that integrates the study of information exposure, information processing, and information effects. At the same time, Toff argues that focusing only on these factors obscures a crucial dynamic at the heart of the misinformation problem—the role and function of news in society is largely social, not informational. Understanding how relational forces influence the spread of misinformation in society will allow us to understand better how misinformation becomes widespread and how it might be curbed.
In Chapter 4, “The Expressive Value of Answering Survey Questions,” Matthew H. Graham and Gregory A. Huber introduce a new method for understanding the expressive value of answering survey questions—that is, the idea that people may misreport their true beliefs to gain some type of expressive benefit. Drawing on data from a survey-embedded experiment that allowed participants to choose to answer additional survey questions, the authors generate several novel findings: Most survey respondents derive expressive benefits from answering survey questions; expressive responding is more common in surveys with partisan content and among individuals who are more politically engaged and partisan; and expressive responding appears to be driven more by
internal factors than by a desire to be “heard” by others. These findings have numerous methodological and interpretive implications for social scientists who study public opinion.
Finally, in Chapter 5, “American Hubris: The Politics of Unwarranted Epistemic Certitude,” David C. Barker, Morgan Marietta, and Ryan DeTamble introduce a new concept to the field of political science: epistemic hubris— which they define as unwarranted certitude when it comes to one’s factual perceptions. Although the evidence is clear with respect to many important politico-factual disputes, it is not with respect to many others. Barker and colleagues find that Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—tend to express certainty toward such blurred realities about 40% of the time, and that such unwarranted certitude, or hubris, is aggravated among men, younger people, partisans, those who are heavy news consumers, those who are highly active on social media, and—especially—those with strong value commitments. Finally, they observe that such epistemic hubris is strongly predictive of an unwillingness to accept legislative compromises with partisan adversaries.
Part II: Causes
The second section of the volume focuses on the question of why the truth has become so politicized, and why so many people are attracted to conspiracy theories. Proposed culprits include intergroup conflict, value projection, partisanship, and “learned helplessness.”
In Chapter 6, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Conflict and the Functions of Falsehood,” Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and John Tooby seek to explain why “truth is the first casualty of war.” They question the assumption that humans are solely motivated to pursue accurate beliefs, arguing that the current circulation of fake news, conspiracy theories, and hostile political rumors is the expected outcome of a deep-seated motivation to dispense with truth in situations of conflict. The authors theorize that the occurrence of intergroup conflict throughout human evolutionary history has built psychological motivations into the human mind to spread information that (a) mobilizes the ingroup against the outgroup, (b) facilitates the coordination of attention within the group, and (c) signals commitment to the group to fellow ingroup members. Petersen, Osmundsen, and Tooby hypothesize that, in all of these instances, human psychology is designed to select information that accomplishes these goals most efficiently rather than to select information on the basis of its veracity. Thus, they conclude that when intergroup conflict is salient, humans are psychologically prepared to prioritize misinformation over truth.
In Chapter 7, “Political Subgroups, Knowledge, and Information: Gun Issues and Gun Ownership,” Donald Haider-Markel, Abigail Vegter, and Patrick Gauding continue making the case for the importance of social group differences as determinants of misinformation—specifically as applied to differences in political knowledge between gun owners and non-gun owners. Making use of survey data from an original poll of U.S. adults, the authors demonstrate that, overall, gun owners display a high degree of accuracy when answering questions about gun ownership, but that they routinely overestimate the number of gun owners in the United States. This said, associated experimental data suggest that correcting people’s estimates of gun ownership rates does little to influence attitudes toward gun regulation. This study highlights the need for more research on knowledge and misinformation among subgroups in American society other than Democratic and Republican partisans.
In Chapter 8, “Value Projection and the Marketplace of Realities,” David C. Barker and Morgan Marietta take a different tack. They argue that dueling fact perceptions—competing assessments of reality—stem at least as much from differences in political values as from differences in knee-jerk partisanship, simple tribal identities, or top-down propagandizing by media elites. Accompanying these findings is an important and somewhat disheartening conclusion that dueling fact perceptions are not likely to become shared anytime soon; in these authors’ view, none of the commonly proposed “correctives” stand much chance of working.
The next two chapters in the volume focus on some Americans’ attraction to conspiracy theories. In Chapter 9, “Conspiracy Theories and Political Identities,” Adam M. Enders and Joseph Uscinski draw on a recent survey of Americans to gauge the popularity of prominent conspiracy theories and understand their causes. The authors establish two main causes underlying belief in conspiracy theories: for many, partisan bias encourages belief in conspiracy theories aligned with their political views; for some, a psychological attraction to conspiracy beliefs motivates their adoption regardless of political content. Although conspiracy theories and beliefs are ever present, they are most likely to proliferate during polarized periods such as the present, when partisan elites are unfortunately more willing to push conspiracy theories for political gain.
In Chapter 10, “Conspiracy Stress or Relief? Learned Helplessness and Conspiratorial Thinking,” Christina Farhart, Joanne Miller, and Kyle Saunders investigate another possible cause of conspiracy theory belief: learned helplessness. Learned helplessness arises when individuals perceive themselves as unable to avoid negative situations in their lives or to affect desired change. Such perceptions become incorporated into the self-concept and manifest as feelings of anxiety or loss of control. Drawing on nationally representative panel data sets, the authors demonstrate that learned helplessness increases the likelihood
of conspiratorial thinking and that, importantly, this relationship appears to be bidirectional—over time, conspiratorial thinking also tends to increase learned helplessness. Farhart, Miller, and Saunders’s account has important implications for the demand-side account of conspiracy theory origins.
Part III: Correctives
The volume’s final section—its largest—addresses a deceptively simple question: Can we correct misinformed beliefs by providing people with the “correct” information? And, importantly, what are the consequences, if any, of doing so? Overall, these chapters provide cause for cautious optimism. Fact checks do not always work, and do not work across all groups; however, on balance, the evidence seems to tip in favor of corrective effects with real political relevance.
The first three chapters in this section all grapple with the effects of corrective information related to the economy. In Chapter 11, “Opinion Formation in Light of the Facts: How Correcting Mistaken Beliefs about Income Inequality Affects Public Support for Redistribution,” Cheryl Boudreau and Scott MacKenzie tackle Americans’ beliefs about the current state of wealth division. They theorize that mistaken beliefs about income inequality contribute to citizens’ lack of demand for greater redistribution. To test this theory, the authors conduct a survey-embedded experiment that randomly assigned participants to receive factual or partisan information on economic inequality. They find that misinformation about inequality is indeed rampant. When provided accurate information about high levels of wealth inequality, however, participants—regardless of partisanship—better connect their value for greater equality to their redistribution preferences. The authors’ findings suggest that opinion on other political issues may be shaped by the same underlying dynamics—public misconstructions of reality standing in the way of properly linking popular values to public policy proposals.
In Chapter 12, “Can Facts Change Minds? The Case of Free Trade,” Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood discuss the understudied case of free trade. Like many economic topics, free trade is an issue about which the public knows little. Unlike with other economic topics, however, the views of political elites on trade have shifted in recent years. It is within this context that Porter and Wood examine the impact of fact checks that counter anti-free trade misperceptions. The authors find not only that this information changed people’s factual beliefs about free trade, but that it also led respondents to become more supportive of free trade. This study is especially important because few researchers have shown such direct attitudinal change in response to factual information.
In Chapter 13, “Do Facts Change Public Attitudes toward Fiscal Policy?” John Sides comes to a different conclusion. He finds corrective information does not change minds, at least not in the arena of fiscal policy. Across three original survey experiments, he examines the effect of providing people with information about the country’s fiscal health—especially its budget deficit and national debt. In general, this information did not lead voters to align their policy preferences with their concerns about the deficit and debt nor did it change attitudes about fiscal policy, even when substantial misperceptions were corrected. Thus, although continued partisan spin about fiscal politics is unfortunate, Sides concludes that a more “truthful” fiscal politics might not change public opinion much.
Considering the conflicting findings of Sides as opposed to Porter and Wood, the next step in this research agenda would seem to be better understanding of the conditions under which corrective information influences people. Thus, in Chapter 14, “Authoritarianism, Fact-Checking, and Citizens’ Response to Presidential Election Information,” Amanda Wintersieck focuses on the differentiating impact of personality. To better understand how authoritarianism in the public influences individuals’ responses to fact-checking opportunities and information, Wintersieck analyzes an original experiment conducted during the 2016 presidential election. She finds that those who score low versus high in authoritarianism choose different fact-check sources, with those lower in authoritarianism preferring more neutral sources. Importantly, the success of the fact checks themselves is mixed and influenced in complex ways by the interaction of authoritarianism and partisanship. These findings highlight the fact that “on average” effects of corrective information likely hide considerable variation at the individual level.
The next two chapters in this section focus on corrective information as it pertains to social issues. In Chapter 15, “Combatting the Anti-Muslim Rhetoric of the 2016 Presidential Campaign: An Experimental Investigation of the Impact of Corrective News,” Kim Fridkin and Jillian Courey examine the potential power and limits of corrective news about Muslim Americans in today’s highly polarized media environment. Focusing on the differential influence of news sources (here, Fox News, MSNBC, and Reuters), the authors find that “disfluency” experienced when corrective information contrasts with the expected partisan slant of a news source impedes learning and opinion change. Subjects who received favorable, corrective facts about Muslims from Fox News took longer to process the information, were less likely to recall the facts presented, and held more negative views about Muslims and Syrian refugees than those who received information from other sources.
In Chapter 16, “Citizen Deliberation as a Correction: The Role of Deliberative Mini-Publics in Addressing Political Misperceptions,” Justin Reedy, Chris Anderson, and Paola Conte go beyond ordinary fact checks to investigate the
