Keep in mind again all of our second number one concern: From what the quantity do political personality apply at just how individuals understand the brand new title “bogus development”?

Values on the “phony development”

To resolve you to definitely matter, i again examined the newest solutions sufferers offered whenever expected what fake development and you can propaganda indicate. I reviewed solely those solutions where sufferers considering a definition to possess often name (55%, letter = 162). Keep in mind that the fresh new ratio regarding victims exactly who considering including meanings is actually lower than during the Studies 1 (95%) and you can 2 (88%). Upon better examination, i unearthed that numerous victims had more than likely pasted meanings away from an Google search. In the an exploratory analysis, i found a mathematically significant difference regarding chances that people considering an effective pasted definition, predicated on Governmental Identification, ? dos (dos, N = 162) = seven.66, p = 0.022. Particularly, conservatives (23%) was basically likely to be than just centrists (6%) to incorporate an effective pasted meaning, ? 2 (step 1, N = 138) = eight.30, p = 0.007, Otherwise = cuatro.57, 95% CI [step one.29, ], all other p opinions > 0.256. Liberals fell anywhere between such extremes, with thirteen% getting a great pasted meaning. Since the we were interested in subjects’ own definitions, we omitted these types of suspicious answers of research (n = 27).

I accompanied a comparable analytical processes such as Studies step 1 and you may dos. Table cuatro screens these research. As the dining table reveals, new proportions of sufferers whose solutions included the characteristics explained into the Experiment step 1 have been similar all over political identification. Specifically, i did not replicate brand new interested in of Check out 1, in which those who known remaining was basically more likely to provide separate meanings toward terms than individuals who understood proper, ? dos (step one, Letter = 90) = step 1.42, p = 0.233, some other p beliefs > 0.063.

Extra exploratory analyses

We now turn to our additional exploratory analyses specific to this experiment. First, we examine the extent to which people’s reported familiarity with our news sources varies according to their political identification. Liberals and conservatives iliar with different sources, and we know that familiarity can act as a guide in determining what is true (Alter and Oppenheimer 2009). To examine this idea, we ran a two-way Ailiarity, treating Political Identification as a between-subjects factor with three levels (Left, Center, Right) and News Source as a within-subject factor with 42 levels (i.e., Table 1). This analysis showed that the influence of political identification on subjects’ familiarity ratings differed across the sources: F(2, 82) = 2.11, p < 0.001, ? 2 = 0.01. Closer inspection revealed that conservatives reported higher familiarity than liberals for most news sources, with centrists falling in-between (Fs range 6.62-, M_{Right-Leftover} range 0.62-1.39, all p values < 0.002). The exceptions-that is, where familiarity ratings were not meaningfully different across political identification-were the media giants: The BBC, CNN, Fox News, Google News, The Guardian, The New York Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, and CBS News.

We also predicted that familiarity with our news sources would be positively associated with real news ratings and negatively associated with fake news ratings. To test this idea, we calculated-for each news source-correlations between familiarity and real news ratings, and familiarity and fake news ratings. In line with our prediction, we found that familiarity was positively associated with real news ratings across all news sources: maximum r_Genuine(292) = 0.48, 95% CI [0.39, 0.57]; minimum r_Real(292) = 0.15, 95% CI [0.04, 0.26]. But in contrast with what we predicted, we found that familiarity was also positively associated with fake news ratings, for two out of every three news sources: maximum r_Phony(292) = 0.34, 95% CI [0.23, 0.44]; minimum r_Fake(292) = 0.12, 95% CI [0.01, 0.23]. Only one of the remaining 14 sources-CNN-was negatively correlated, r_Fake(292) = -0.15, 95% CI [-0.26, -0.03]; all other CIs crossed zero. Taken together, these exploratory results, while tentative, might suggest that familiarity with a news source leads to a bias in which people agree with any claim about that source.