Conservatives are less accurate than liberals at recognizing false climate statements, and disinformation makes conservatives less discerning: Evidence from 12 countries

Abstract

Competing hypotheses exist on how conservative political ideology is associated with susceptibility to misinformation. We performed a secondary analysis of responses from 1,721 participants from twelve countries in a study that investigated the effects of climate disinformation and six psychological interventions to protect participants against such disinformation. Participants were randomized to receiving twenty real climate disinformation statements or to a passive control condition. All participants then evaluated a separate set of true and false climate-related statements in support of or aiming to delay climate action in a truth discernment task. We found that conservative political ideology is selectively associated with increased misidentification of false statements aiming to delay climate action as true. These findings can be explained as a combination of expressive responding, partisanship bias, and motivated reasoning.