Department of Political Science and Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Sep 12;120(37):e2308938120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2308938120. Epub 2023 Sep 5.
A growing consensus suggests that a cause of support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence is that partisans misperceive the other side. That is, they vastly exaggerate the extent to which members of the other party support undemocratic practices and violence. When these misperceptions are corrected, citizens' own beliefs moderate. I present results from an experiment that show that misperception corrections do not have an effect in the presence of competing information (i.e., that challenges the validity of the correction or offers a conflicting narrative). Basic corrections do not constitute a robust way to counter democratic backsliding stemming from citizens' misperceptions. The results highlight the need to devise stronger misperception interventions and, more generally, to consider competing information environments when devising any scalable behavioral intervention.
越来越多的共识表明,支持不民主行为和党派暴力的一个原因是,党派人士错误地看待对方。也就是说,他们大大夸大了另一方成员支持不民主行为和暴力的程度。当这些误解得到纠正时,公民自己的信仰就会缓和。我提出了一个实验的结果,表明在存在竞争信息的情况下(即,挑战纠正的有效性或提供冲突性叙述),误解纠正没有效果。基本的纠正并不能构成一种有效的方法来对抗源于公民误解的民主倒退。研究结果强调了需要设计更强有力的误解干预措施,更普遍地说,在设计任何可扩展的行为干预措施时,需要考虑竞争信息环境。