Why the Right Is More Willing to Spread Fake News, Researchers Say

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Let It Burn!

Republicans are more willing than Democrats to spread fake news—particularly during times of greater "political polarization," or competition between the parties—because they want to win more.

That is the conclusion of a study, published in the Journal of Marketing, by marketing researchers Xiajing Zhu and Connie Pechmann, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the university.

They found that Republicans respond to political competition more aggressively, communicating information that is likely untrue, if not definitively false, to boost their side.

"Although Republicans may understand the content is very likely false, they are willing to spread it because they strongly value their party winning over the competition," Zhu said in a statement.

"Democrats do not value winning nearly as strongly. They place more value on equity and inclusion, seeing the world in a fundamentally different way than Republicans," she said.
 

Republicans are more willing than Democrats to spread fake news—particularly during times of greater "political polarization," or competition between the parties—because they want to win more.

That is the conclusion of a study, published in the Journal of Marketing, by marketing researchers Xiajing Zhu and Connie Pechmann, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the university.

They found that Republicans respond to political competition more aggressively, communicating information that is likely untrue, if not definitively false, to boost their side.

"Although Republicans may understand the content is very likely false, they are willing to spread it because they strongly value their party winning over the competition," Zhu said in a statement.

"Democrats do not value winning nearly as strongly. They place more value on equity and inclusion, seeing the world in a fundamentally different way than Republicans," she said.
Researchers... Yea... :rolleyes:

Seems to me to be a Pygmalion effect going on there.

Here's how they determined what was false or true...

Zhu and her colleagues came to their conclusion after a series of studies—the first two of which focused on fact-checked statements by U.S. public figures made in the news media and on social media between 2007 and 2022.

Statements were sourced via the fact-checking website PolitiFact, which allows journalists to rate each statement on a six-point scale ranging from "true or accurate" to "pants on fire."
(from the article cited in the OP)

As anyone with a scintilla of intellect knows, PolitiFact is just a political op ed site that's no better, or more accurate, than any other such site. It is also well known to have a bias towards the Left and against the Right.

They then further had participants who self-described their political positions answer a number of subjective questions and give their opinions on various subject matter.

Their whole body of research on this is to use a word, bullshit. Note, I'm not arguing about whether the Left, Right, Up, Down, whatever, are more or less biased, only that these two quack academics produced bullshit research that is next to meaningless.

Here's a better study from Harvard on this that pretty much smashes the above study to bits.


And a very interesting graphic from that study:

Figure2_wide.png
 
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