| Sure. Everyone is biased some.
Going all the way back to the "1951 Princeton–Dartmouth football game" The Right, just happens to be in a bit in a slump right now with its anti-science religious activism. "Doing worse" Garrett & Bond (2021), Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions, Science Advances.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc... Sultan et al. (2024), Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis,
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409329121?utm_source=... Rathje et al. (2023), Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information, Nature Human Behaviour. This one emphasizes that misinformation judgments are shaped by both accuracy motives and social/identity motives, which helps explain why partisan gaps are not simply about intelligence or total inability to separate truth from fiction.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_sourc... Lyons et al. (2021), Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility,
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019527118?utm_source=... Pennycook et al. (2022), Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing online misinformation, Nature Communications. This paper discusses baseline sharing discernment and notes worse baseline discernment among conservatives in the samples they studied, while also showing that simple accuracy prompts can help.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_sourc... summary is: there are studies showing conservatives, on average, perform worse on certain misinformation/truth-discernment tasks, but the strongest scholarly version of the claim is narrower and more conditional than the popular retelling
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc... |
> it is possible that conservatives’ relatively low accuracy about political information is a by-product of the fact that issues used in forming this assessment were selected with an eye toward detecting misperceptions among the political group
That's definitely a way to bias a study against conservatives. It's good that this study claims it avoided that bias. But did it? They don't list the questions that participants were asked. I checked the list of supporting documents, and couldn't find it.
Without that list, I can't accept this source. Sorry.
If I went out and asked a bunch of Liberals, "did Trump say that Neo-Nazis are 'very fine people?'" I suspect that upwards of 90% of Liberals would answer "yes" ...and they would swear they heard him do it! You may (falsely) believe this yourself!
I could ask, "did Trump advise people to drink bleach?" and many Liberals would swear he did.
He didn't do either of those things. But many Liberals emphatically believe he did. I could very easily design a study that included only these sorts of questions - questions that Liberals will get wrong.
The only way to spot this bias would be if I included the questions in the study, so that you could vet them yourself. Without such a list, it is completely reasonable for me to reject your source.
Should I continue to the next one, or are they all like this?