Reliable Sources? Correcting Misinformation in Polarized Media Environments

• Author: Patrick W. Kraft,Shin Young Park,Amanda Heideman,Jason T. Neumeyer,Nicholas R. Davis,Taraleigh Davis
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211041570
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 50(1) 17 –29

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211041570

American Politics Research

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211041570

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Article

Citizens in western democracies hold wide-ranging and sys-

tematic misperceptions about immigrants to their home

countries. For example, people usually overestimate the

total number of immigrants or the proportion of immigrants

that are dependent on social welfare (Alesina et al., 2019).

These factual misperceptions are reinforced by the news

media and, in turn, can foster biased attitudes and stereo-

types (Wright et al., 2020). Given the extensive spread of

misinformation, researchers from various disciplines started

examining how corrective information may affect people’s

underlying attitudes (see Flynn et al., 2017 for a review).

However, while corrective information may alleviate some

factual misperceptions, it rarely affects people’s underlying

attitudes (Hopkins et al., 2019; Swire-Thompson et al.,

2020).

A possible explanation for this apparent disconnect could

be that factual information is simply irrelevant for attitude

formation and—if anything—serves as a mere justification

for people to rationalize their existing predispositions toward

immigrant populations. Yet the extent to which people

engage in such motivated reasoning is not without limits

since they tend to update their prior beliefs after reaching a

“tipping point” of counter-attitudinal information (Redlawsk

et al., 2010). Furthermore, recent studies on immigration

attitudes demonstrate the persuasiveness of certain interven-

tions such as canvassing (Kalla & Broockman, 2020).

Why do researchers frequently fail to find evidence of

attitude change after providing respondents with corrective

information? We argue that most experimental designs in

this area are inconclusive because they omit a crucial mecha-

nism: people’s discretion over whether to engage with a

given information source or not. Specifically, studies usually

employ simple random assignment of informational treat-

ments without considering people’s selective exposure.

Unfortunately, such a design does not allow us to estimate

the effect of misinformation corrections among people who

would have chosen to access the information in the first place

(De Benedictis-Kessner et al., 2019; Knox et al., 2019).

Furthermore, denying people the freedom to select sources

can increase reactance and counter-arguing and therefore

render corrections less effective (Stroud et al., 2019).

We address these shortcomings by implementing an

experimental design that varies both the source of misinfor-

mation corrections, as well as the process through which

people access the information. Specifically, we conduct an

1041570APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211041570American Politics ResearchKraft et al.

research-article2021

1University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

2University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, USA

Corresponding Author:

Patrick W. Kraft, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Bolton 658, 3210

N. Maryland Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA.

Email: kraftp@uwm.edu

Reliable Sources? Correcting Misinformation

in Polarized Media Environments

Patrick W. Kraft1, Nicholas R. Davis, Taraleigh Davis1,

Amanda Heideman1, Jason T. Neumeyer2,

and Shin Young Park1

Abstract

Providing corrective information can reduce factual misperceptions among the public but it tends to have little effect on

people’s underlying attitudes. Our study examines how the impact of misinformation corrections is moderated by media

choice. In our experiment, participants are asked to read a news article published by Fox News or MSNBC, each highlighting

the positive economic impact of legal immigration in the United States. While the news content is held constant, our

treatment manipulates whether participants are allowed to freely choose a media outlet or are randomly assigned. Our

results demonstrate the importance of people’s ability to choose: While factual misperceptions are easily corrected

regardless of how people gained access to information, subsequent opinion change is conditional on people’s prior willingness

to seek out alternative sources. As such, encouraging people to broaden their media diet may be more effective to combat

misinformation than disseminating fact-checks alone.

Keywords

political misperceptions, misinformation correction, immigration, selective exposure, attitude change