Suchergebnisse

Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments—that is, the potential for cues to yield accurate judgments about a clearly defined reference class. In this paper, we present the results of two studies exploring whether people use party labels to make judgments about a random sample of U.S. Representatives' voting behaviors. We find that respondents consistently performed worse in guessing U.S. Representatives' votes than if they had correctly used a simple partisan heuristic. There is also some evidence that people performed worse with the presence of more nonparty cues. Attention to politics had a positive relationship with accuracy in both studies, although the relationship was modest. The results suggest that party cues may be more difficult to apply than some research has suggested.

Abstract
Much scholarly attention has been paid to the effects of misinformation on beliefs and attitudes, but rarely have studies investigated potential downstream effects of misinformation exposure on belief judgments involving subsequent factual statements. Drawing from work on anchoring-and-adjustment and defensive reasoning, this study examines how exposure to initial falsehoods that vary in terms of their plausibility shapes subsequent belief judgments. Across two survey experiments, we find that initial exposure to a less plausible statement decreases belief in subsequent statements, whether true or false. This order effect has implications for misinformation research, as studies examining audience responses to a single falsehood may fail to capture the full range of misinformation effects. Other implications are discussed in this article.