Medical Express - How liberal or conservative a person is predicts how likely they are to believe information about potential hazards, a new UCLA-led study has found.
The study, which will be published in the journal Psychological Science, found that people who hold more socially conservative views were significantly more likely than people with liberal beliefs to find false information about threats credible.
The researchers, led by UCLA anthropology professor Daniel Fessler, began their work long before revelations regarding the proliferation and possible impact of fake news, but their findings might help explain why profit-driven efforts to spread misinformation aimed at conservatives were more successful than equally untrue reports aimed at liberals during the 2016 presidential election. False, inflammatory stories that were designed to appeal to a liberal audience didn't generate the massive numbers of clicks or shares required to be lucrative via online ad networks. Some conservative content, however, did.
"People have a general tendency to believe information about dangers more than they believe information about benefits," said Fessler, who was the study's lead author. "This is an understandable pattern given that the costs of encountering dangers will often be higher than the costs of taking unnecessary precautions."
Fessler continued: "Imagine that someone tells you that eating pink mushrooms will kill you. If you ignore them and they're right, you die; if you believe them and they're wrong, you just miss out on some salad fixings. So, we all have a tendency to find information about dangers more believable."
In two studies of Americans, one conducted in 2015 and one in 2016, people were asked to decide how true or false each of 16 statements were. Half of the statements concerned benefits (for example, "Exercising on an empty stomach burns more calories"), and half of the statements concerned hazards ("An intoxicated passenger could partially open the exit door on a commercial jetliner, causing the cabin to depressurize and the oxygen masks to deploy"). All but two of the 16 statements were false. Participants also reported their political leanings by indicating their positions on a variety of politically charged issues.
Conservatives and liberals did not differ in how much they thought the statements about benefits were true, but showed clear differences in how much they believed the statements about hazards. Looking more closely at people's opinions on a variety of political topics, the researchers found that this was driven by participants' views on social issues, such as abortion and marriage for same-sex couples. Respondents' opinions about economic issues, such as tax cuts, did not predict how much they believed statements about hazards, Fessler said.
"Social conservatives see safety in the status quo, while liberals see opportunity in change," said Fessler, explaining that neither perspective, conservative or liberal, is more effective than the other in dealing with the world around us.
3 comments:
Democrats sure fell for Obama's hope and change scam, and many of them are still convinced that Hil & Bill are somehow progressive populists. So who's really the most gullible?
The most gullible are those who vote for Democrats or Republicans
Except for the current scare that the Russians are coming. Putin purportedly fixed the 2016 election by releasing true information about the DNC attack against Sanders which subverted Trump voters from their patriotic loyalty to Putin's enemies. This does not rise to Rube Goldberg logic, rather is a shell game, that denies the science as to what influenced voters in 2016. But it serves the US intelligence-press community in defending against a credibility challenge from Russia. Russia remains an enemy because it possesses accurate intelligence on the US. Putin's alleged release of true information during the election is a crime that Trump must answer for to the press censors under the precedent of Watergate. Trump GOP isolationists who are more like Taft and less like Dewey, are probably less concerned about Russia than Dem neoliberals, who are now more conservative about giving up the cold war since Truman started it. The charge is that Trump is susceptible to spies if not an unwitting one himself. Constitutionally, a President, after the U-2 incident, is not merely an Article 2 executive and commander in chief, but also, is the number one spy, a position the unimpeachable Obama ably filled after Bush and his father had their covers blown. Anti-Bush Trump is ill-suited. The national intent, since Wilson, to target Russia as an enemy, abandoned by FDR in preserving the nation's existence, is still more determinative than whoever may happen to win a presidential election or what lessons might have been learned in 1962 and 1983 about human extinction.
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