Individuals who fail a test of cognitive reflectiveness are more likely to doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and also less likely to characterize the January 6 Capitol attack as violent and extreme, according to new research published in American Behavioral Scientist. The new study indicates that fact-checking articles by media organizations can successfully influence attitudes about the 2020 election, particularly among those who are show a greater ability to correct faulty intuitions.
“We have been interested in fact-checking for several years, so when we realized that nearly a third of Americans believe former President Trump’s false claims that systematic and decisive fraud caused him to lose the election, we wanted to explore strategies for correcting their false beliefs,” said study author David Lynn Painter, an assistant professor at Rollins College.
“Specifically, we wanted to measure how the ways that Americans think (intuitive and heuristic versus reflective and critical thinking) may influence their responses to election fraud fact-checking. Thus, we designed an experiment with a control and a treatment condition to measure fact-checking’s influence on viewers’ confidence in the election’s legitimacy and characterizations of the January 6 Capitol Hill attack.”
Painter and his co-author, Juliana Fernandes, recruited 737 adults from Prolific Academic crowdsourcing platform and from a college in the United States between September 17 and 24, 2021....
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