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Citation

Misinformation and Motivated Reasoning Responses to Economic News in a Politicized Environment

Author:
Schaffner, Brian F.; Roche, Cameron
Publication:
Public Opinion Quarterly
Year:
2017

Public opinion scholars have recently focused on understanding why surveys report such high levels of misinformation among otherwise knowledgeable and engaged partisans. In this paper, we take advantage of a natural experiment involving the October 2012 jobs report announcement to gain a more complete understanding of how individu- als’ beliefs are influenced by new salient information in a politicized environment. We examine reactions by Republicans and Democrats on a factual question about the unemployment rate immediately before and after the announcement that unemployment had fallen below 8 percent for the first time during the Obama presidency. Using a variety of tech- niques, including response latency measures, we conclude that partisans did react to the jobs report by engaging in motivated reasoning, provid- ing a clearer understanding of why individuals respond to factual ques- tions in vastly different ways.