Democrats are better than Republicans at discerning true and false news but do not have better metacognitive awareness

Abstract

Insight into one’s own cognitive abilities is one important aspect of metacognition. Whether this insight varies between groups when discerning true and false information has yet to be examined. We investigated whether demographics like political partisanship and age were associated with discernment ability, metacognitive efficiency, and response bias for true and false news. Participants rated the veracity of true and false news headlines and provided confidence ratings for each judgment. We found that Democrats and older adults were better at discerning true and false news than Republicans and younger adults. However, all demographic groups maintained good insight into their discernment ability. Although Republicans were less accurate than Democrats, they slightly outperformed Democrats in metacognitive efficiency when a politically equated item set was used. These results suggest that even when individuals mistake misinformation to be true, they are aware that they might be wrong.

The political (a)symmetry of metacognitive insight into detecting misinformation.

“…This may explain why our hypotheses for overall metacognitive blind spots (Hypothesis 1.1 and Hypothesis 1.2) and lowered metacognitive efficiency among the politically (extreme) right (Hypothesis 2.1–Hypothesis 2.3) were not confirmed or confirmed only for conservatives judging discordant statements. Consistent with our results, a recent study (Dobbs et al, 2023) found no notable differences in metacognitive efficiency along U.S. party lines across all statements. However, the study did not find lower metacognitive efficiency among conservatives judging discordant statements.…”

“…10Note that we obtained qualitatively similar—albeit less pronounced—results for reduced metacognitive efficiency among conservatives judging incongruent statements when we employed the two-way congruency coding used by Dobbs et al (2023), that is, considering only a statement’s slant and a participant’s political views, irrespective of the truth of the statement, see .…”

The Political (A)Symmetry of Metacognitive Insight Into Detecting Misinformation

“…This may explain why our hypotheses for overall metacognitive blind spots (H1.1 and H1.2) and lowered metacognitive efficiency among the politically (extreme) right (H2.1-H2.3) were not confirmed or confirmed only for conservatives judging discordant statements. Consistent with our results, a recent study (Dobbs et al, 2023) found no notable differences in metacognitive efficiency along U.S. party lines across all statements.…”

“…Republicans, relative to Democrats, are both exposed to and share more articles from unreliable websites (Grinberg et al, 2019;Guess et al, 2019;Guess et al, 2020), and there is growing evidence that conservatives are more susceptible to misinformation than liberals (see, e.g., Clemm von Hohenberg, 2023;Dobbs et al, 2023;Rathje et al, 2020). Roozenbeek et al, 2022;van der Linden et al, 2021).…”

Supersharers of fake news on Twitter

“…Another reason may be that supersharing offers women an alternative form of activism, independent of the political establishment ( 25 ). Finally, it is possible that several individual differences may contribute to this behavior, such as perceived inequality ( 26 ), perceived threat to status ( 27 ), true and false news discernment ability ( 28 , 29 ), or even differences in sharing motivations ( 30 ).…”