Summary
A new Journal of Marketing study finds that political polarization drives Republicans to spread misinformation to gain partisan advantage, while Democrats do not exhibit this behavior.
Republicans value winning highly and are more likely to share misinformation, even when its truth is questionable.
Six studies, including analyses of fact-checked statements, surveys, and presidential speeches, support these findings.
The spread of misinformation undermines democratic processes, such as increased restrictive voting laws after the 2020 election.
Researchers suggest reducing polarization, investing in fact-checking, and expanding media literacy education to combat misinformation’s impact.
“Republicans repeat propaganda and democrats don’t” isn’t even the conclusion of this paper, which you’d know if you had actually looked at it. In fact, we already knew that republicans spread more disinfo than democrats, it’s been demonstrated in multiple studies that are cited in this paper.
This particular study’s interest is about what triggers it : “Our research enhances our understanding of when and why conservatives tend to spread more misinformation than liberals. We find that an ideological asymmetry emerges when politically polarized situations trigger conservatives’ desire for ingroup dominance. Acting on that salient desire, conservatives spread ingroup-skewed political misinformation, which is of uncertain accuracy, but not definitively false. In less polarized situations, conservatives’ desire to achieve ingroup dominance is tempered, along with their misinformation conveyance.”
This is literally the headline of the Article “Republicans Respond to Political Polarization by Spreading Misinformation, Democrats Don’t”.
I don’t even like republicans (nor do I like democrats) but articles like this are just so blatantly biased, I don’t understand that people believe it. Do you really believe that D or R determines how good someone is to spot misinformation and also determines how likely it is for that person to share it… Come on. People are too similar, we have more in common than we like to admit. I’m just at likely to be suckered by marketing, as are you, as is a republican.
Source: your ass.
You have the correlation backwards. Being a Republican doesn’t make you bad at critical thinking, but being bad at critical thinking really makes you susceptible to Republican propaganda.
My point, completely glossed over, is that this open article was written by two doctorates in marketing, which is sketchy and should trigger your spidey sense… Or you could slightly shrug, continue your day and don’t challenge your preconceived notions.
It makes a kind of sense. Marketing is basically Applied Psychology. Who better to study the grifters and the mechanisms by which they grift?
Yes, I 100% do. If R or D was arbitrarily assigned to everyone at birth, then no it wouldn’t make sense, but this isn’t a double-blind control study. Roughly 2/3 of those who never attended college–which for many reasons (reading comprehension, exposure to new ideas, exposure to media literacy training) probably correlates pretty strongly with ability to spot misinformation–voted R in the last election. 2/3 of those with advanced degrees–the other end of that spectrum–voted D.