Source: Politifact
Contrary to popular belief, nearly all humans doing politics are mostly irrational, biased, and emotional. Many are uncomfortably gullible when faced with talented demagogues and their powerful emotion and reality manipulation tactics. That’s just the human condition. Social science research has pretty well identified the major human traits that underpin many people rejecting facts, robust truths and good faith, sound reasoning when they are too inconvenient.
It’s unconscious human response to perceived attack or threat
Long story short, fact checks often fail when people see and feel partisan threat in inconvenient information. Humans tend to experience correction of strongly help false beliefs as an attack on their own or their group identity. That feeling, an automatic unconscious response to threat, triggers motivated reasoning and defensive mental reasoning instead of belief reassessment and revision. In bitterly polarized societies like the US today, partisan virtue signals and demagogic messaging simply overpower the evidentiary weight of fact checking.
Fact checks usually include explicit reference to political actors or issues. That instantly cues partisan lenses and trigger defensive processing when the information is inconvenient. Party identification strongly affects trust in fact-checkers. Many or most partisans see fact checkers as aligned with the opposing camp. That alone is sufficient to neutralize any corrective effects of truth even when the evidence is clear and solid. In America’s poisoned political environment, fact checks are perceived and felt as just bad faith lies in bitter partisan disagreements.
The left vs the right
And, believe it or not, there probably some degree of asymmetry in attitudes towards fact checking and fact checkers between America’s political left and right. Not surprisingly, some of the political right seems to be more resistant to fact checkers and fact checking. One can rationally argue in good faith that this asymmetry, assuming it is real, is solid evidence of serious immorality in political rhetoric significantly grounded in falsehoods or crackpot reasoning. Dishonest speech is arguably evil when people are deceived by false information and that causes serious harm or even death to the deceived people or others they affect.
Q1: Is it true that America’s political right tends to be more resistant to fact checkers and fact checking than the left?
Q2: Is it a rational moral argument to say that dishonest speech that deceives people and those false beliefs cause some people harm or even death, e.g., anti-vaccines lies that cause some to refuse to get vaccinated, and then they get infected and die, or they infect someone else who gets infected and dies?
Info sources:
When it comes to misinformation, partisanship overpowers fact-checking, over and over again — Why do people fail to update their beliefs in light of clear evidence to the contrary? Our research provides an answer: partisanship is a powerful factor that can lead people away from accuracy.
Heroes or hacks: The partisan divide over fact-checking — Liberal websites were far more likely to cite fact-checks to make their points than conservative sites were. Conservative sites were much more likely to criticize fact-checks and to allege partisan bias.
Blinded by Partisanship? The Limitations of Fact-Checkers in Correcting Misinformation During the 2021 Georgia Senate Runoff Elections — In recent years, partisan polarization has intensified, and social media has amplified the spread of inaccurate information. ….. Our findings show that partisan biases prevented fact-checking efforts from changing perceptions of misinformation. Party identification also influenced participants’ trust in fact-checkers.
Why the backfire effect does not explain the durability of political misperceptions — ….. the accuracy-increasing effects of corrective information like fact checks often do not last or accumulate; instead, they frequently seem to decay or be overwhelmed by cues from elites and the media promoting more congenial but less accurate claims. As a result, misperceptions typically persist in public opinion for years after they have been debunked.
Warning labels from fact checkers work — even if you don’t trust them — In line with previous studies, the researchers found that Republican-leaning survey participants were less likely to trust fact-checkers — regardless of whether the fact-checking organizations skewed right or left. ….. Republican respondents who knew more about news production, who scored more highly on a cognitive reasoning test, and who had higher web use skills were even less trusting of fact-checkers.
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