Thanks for sharing these additional ideas and insights!
Also removing the extent to which dishonesty pays, for example with better fact-checking services.
I ran (and published a paper on) an experiment on fact-checking for my Psychology Honours in 2017, so I have a smidge of knowledge here, though it’s a bit rusty. Some brief thoughts:
I do suspect “better fact-checking services”, in the sense of more accuracy or checking more facts, would be somewhatbeneficial
But I think there’s some reason for pessimism about just how much people really “care” about the results of fact-checks, even when they see those fact-checks. Here’s my study’s abstract:
In the ‘post-truth era’, political fact-checking has become an issue of considerable significance. A recent study in the context of the 2016 US election found that fact-checks of statements by Donald Trump changed participants’ beliefs about those statements—regardless of whether participants supported Trump—but not their feelings towards Trump or voting intentions. However, the study balanced corrections of inaccurate statements with an equal number of affirmations of accurate statements. Therefore, the null effect of fact-checks on participants’ voting intentions and feelings may have arisen because of this artificially created balance. Moreover, Trump’s statements were not contrasted with statements from an opposing politician, and Trump’s perceived veracity was not measured. The present study (N = 370) examined the issue further, manipulating the ratio of corrections to affirmations, and using Australian politicians (and Australian participants) from both sides of the political spectrum. We hypothesized that fact-checks would correct beliefs and that fact-checks would affect voters’ support (i.e. voting intentions, feelings and perceptions of veracity), but only when corrections outnumbered affirmations. Both hypotheses were supported, suggesting that a politician’s veracity does sometimes matter to voters. The effects of fact-checking were similar on both sides of the political spectrum, suggesting little motivated reasoning in the processing of fact-checks.
This is also relevant to the following sentence from the original post: “While the notion of Dark Tetrad traits is not foremost in most people’s minds, one could argue that much political debate is about related concepts like the trustworthiness or honesty of candidates, and voters do value those attributes.” I think this is true, but probably less true than many might think (or at least than they would’ve thought pre-2016).
And then there’s also the matter of whether people come to encounter fact-checks in the first place. In my study’s conclusion, I wrote that “participants were unable to avoid fact-checks or to select which ones they received. In reality, some people may not encounter any fact-checks at all [9], and the sample of fact-checks which others encounter is often influenced by selective exposure and selective sharing [65,66].” (I feel weird about quoting myself, but 2017 Michael knew more about this than 2020 Michael does!)
So I’d tentatively see more value in making fact-checking services “better” in the sense of being clearer, more attention-grabbing, better publicised, or things like that (as long as this doesn’t cost too much accuracy, nuance, etc.), rather than in e.g. making more or more accurate fact-checks.
And there may be still more value in somehow “shifting norms” towards valuing truth more highly, or things like that, though I don’t know how one would actually do that. (I’m guessing this post is relevant, but I haven’t read it yet.)
I’ve just read the results of an interesting new study on the effect of red-flagging some information on social media, with flags such as “Multiple fact-checking journalists dispute the credibility of this news”, and variations with “Multiple fact-checking journalists” replaced by, alternatively, “Major news outlets”, “A majority of Americans”, or “Computer algorithms using AI”. The researchers tested the effect this had on the propensity of people to share the content. The effect of the “fact-checking” phrasing was the most pronounced, and very significant (a reduction of about 40% of the probability to share content; which jumps to 60% for people who identify as Democrats). Overall the effect of the “AI” phrasing was also very significant, but quite counterintuitively it has the effect of increasing the probability of sharing content for people who identify as Republicans! (By about 8%; it decreases that same probability by 40% for people who identify as Democrats.) https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/researchers-find-red-flagging-misinformation-could-slow-spread-fake-news-social-media
Thank you for the insight. I really have no strong view on how useful each / any of the ideas I suggested were. They were just ideas.
I would add on this point that narcissistic politicians I have encountered worried about appearance and bad press. I am pretty sure that transparency and fact checking etc discouraged them from making harmful decisions. Not every narcissistic leader is like Trump.
Yeah, that sounds right to me. And reminds me of a paper I read when working on that experiment, the abstract of which was:
Does external monitoring improve democratic performance? Fact-checking has come to play an increasingly important role in political coverage in the United States, but some research suggests it may be ineffective at reducing public misperceptions about controversial issues. However, fact-checking might instead help improve political discourse by increasing the reputational costs or risks of spreading misinformation for political elites. To evaluate this deterrent hypothesis, we conducted a field experiment on a diverse group of state legislators from nine U.S. states in the months before the November 2012 election. In the experiment, a randomly assigned subset of state legislators was sent a series of letters about the risks to their reputation and electoral security if they were caught making questionable statements. The legislators who were sent these letters were substantially less likely to receive a negative fact-checking rating or to have their accuracy questioned publicly, suggesting that fact-checking can reduce inaccuracy when it poses a salient threat.
Relatedly, it could be that “more” or “better” fact-checking would lead to better actions by or discourse from politicians, even if voters “don’t really care much” about fact-checks or never really see them, due to politicians overestimating what impact fact-checks would have on voters’ perceptions.
(To be clear, I do think fact-checks probably have at least some impact via the more obvious route too; I wonder mostly about the magnitude of the effect, not whether it exists.)
Thanks for sharing these additional ideas and insights!
I ran (and published a paper on) an experiment on fact-checking for my Psychology Honours in 2017, so I have a smidge of knowledge here, though it’s a bit rusty. Some brief thoughts:
I do suspect “better fact-checking services”, in the sense of more accuracy or checking more facts, would be somewhat beneficial
But I think there’s some reason for pessimism about just how much people really “care” about the results of fact-checks, even when they see those fact-checks. Here’s my study’s abstract:
This is also relevant to the following sentence from the original post: “While the notion of Dark Tetrad traits is not foremost in most people’s minds, one could argue that much political debate is about related concepts like the trustworthiness or honesty of candidates, and voters do value those attributes.” I think this is true, but probably less true than many might think (or at least than they would’ve thought pre-2016).
And then there’s also the matter of whether people come to encounter fact-checks in the first place. In my study’s conclusion, I wrote that “participants were unable to avoid fact-checks or to select which ones they received. In reality, some people may not encounter any fact-checks at all [9], and the sample of fact-checks which others encounter is often influenced by selective exposure and selective sharing [65,66].” (I feel weird about quoting myself, but 2017 Michael knew more about this than 2020 Michael does!)
So I’d tentatively see more value in making fact-checking services “better” in the sense of being clearer, more attention-grabbing, better publicised, or things like that (as long as this doesn’t cost too much accuracy, nuance, etc.), rather than in e.g. making more or more accurate fact-checks.
And there may be still more value in somehow “shifting norms” towards valuing truth more highly, or things like that, though I don’t know how one would actually do that. (I’m guessing this post is relevant, but I haven’t read it yet.)
I’ve just read the results of an interesting new study on the effect of red-flagging some information on social media, with flags such as “Multiple fact-checking journalists dispute the credibility of this news”, and variations with “Multiple fact-checking journalists” replaced by, alternatively, “Major news outlets”, “A majority of Americans”, or “Computer algorithms using AI”. The researchers tested the effect this had on the propensity of people to share the content. The effect of the “fact-checking” phrasing was the most pronounced, and very significant (a reduction of about 40% of the probability to share content; which jumps to 60% for people who identify as Democrats). Overall the effect of the “AI” phrasing was also very significant, but quite counterintuitively it has the effect of increasing the probability of sharing content for people who identify as Republicans! (By about 8%; it decreases that same probability by 40% for people who identify as Democrats.)
https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/researchers-find-red-flagging-misinformation-could-slow-spread-fake-news-social-media
Thank you for the insight. I really have no strong view on how useful each / any of the ideas I suggested were. They were just ideas.
I would add on this point that narcissistic politicians I have encountered worried about appearance and bad press. I am pretty sure that transparency and fact checking etc discouraged them from making harmful decisions. Not every narcissistic leader is like Trump.
Yeah, that sounds right to me. And reminds me of a paper I read when working on that experiment, the abstract of which was:
Relatedly, it could be that “more” or “better” fact-checking would lead to better actions by or discourse from politicians, even if voters “don’t really care much” about fact-checks or never really see them, due to politicians overestimating what impact fact-checks would have on voters’ perceptions.
(To be clear, I do think fact-checks probably have at least some impact via the more obvious route too; I wonder mostly about the magnitude of the effect, not whether it exists.)