Factors influencing the update of beliefs regarding controversial political issues

ABSTRACT

Selectively integrating new information contributes to belief polarization and compromises public discourse. To better understand factors that underlie biased belief updating, I conducted three pre-registered studies covering different controversial political issues. The main hypothesis was that cognitively devaluing new information hinders belief updating. Support for this hypothesis was found in only one of the three issues. The only factor that consistently influenced belief updating across issues was the discrepancy between prior beliefs and new information. These results suggest that usually people do use evidence to correct their beliefs, but may refuse to do so if doubts about its generalizability arise.

KEYWORDS:

• Belief polarization
• belief updating
• cognitive immunization
• confirmation bias
• optimism bias
• post-truth

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Jan-Hendrik Henze who contributed to the conduction of the studies reported here. Moreover, I thank Liron Rozenkrantz for her helpful comments on a previous version of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/pq4ka

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2023.2253981

Notes

1. Climate change has been discussed controversially in the sense that some people (often people supporting the Green party) argue for urgently needed fundamental transformations of the economy and everyday life, whereas others (often conservatives) heavily criticize these claims as being ideologically driven. Similarly, some people are pushing for the introduction of a speed limit on highways, arguing that this would be a simple, cost-effective way to increase traffic safety and decrease CO₂ emissions, whereas others (often liberals) question the supposed beneficial effects of a speed limit and instead argue for people’s freedom to drive as fast as they want to. Finally, the connection between violent crime and immigration has been controversial in that some (often right-wing) people claim that immigrants are more criminal than Germans without a history of immigration, whereas others do not see violent crime among immigrants as a major problem.

2. Of note, although it would have been advantageous for the statistical analysis, I decided not to present a single number of the projected global temperature rise, but a temperature range, as this more appropriately reflects the nature of climate models that are based on the prognosis of different scenarios.

3. Of note, one item of the scale developed by Sunstein et al. referred to the US specifically (“Do you think that the US was right to sign the recent Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?”). As the current study was conducted in Germany, I replaced “US” with “Germany.” Participants rated their answers on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“I totally disagree”) to 7 (“I totally agree”).

4. This measure was similar to the one developed originally by Sunstein et al. (2017); however, the assessment of Sunstein et al. was tied to the US, asking for the expected US temperature rise (in Fahrenheit), so I slightly modified it by asking for the global temperature rise in °C to make this measure more suitable for a German sample.

5. Note that I refrain from referring to this overestimation vs. underestimation as “good news” vs. “bad news,” since this categorization may depend on various factors that can vary across individuals. For example, being informed that the projected temperature rise is higher than expected will be bad news for many people, but to someone who supports acting against climate change, it might be perceived as “good news” because it supports the argument for doing more to fight climate change.

6. Of note, a speed limit on highways can also be supported from perspectives other than traffic safety, e.g., from an environmental/climate change perspective. I decided to focus on the traffic safety perspective not only in order to cover additional aspects beyond climate change, but also because the effects of a speed limit on traffic safety can be determined relatively clearly, whereas its effects on greenhouse gas emissions are more difficult to assess.

7. Note that with six experiments examining this relationship, the chance to falsely assume a significant relationship in one of the experiments, although there in fact is none, is actually 26.5%.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Tobias Kube

Tobias Kube is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from the Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany. His research focuses on understanding how people construct and sustain their mental reality – and how this can result in mental health problems or societal problems such as polarization.