Fact-checking Trump’s election lies can improve confidence in U.S. elections: Experimental evidence

Abstract

As the 2020 campaign unfolded, with a mix of extraordinary embellishments and outright falsehoods, President Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the U.S. electoral system grew louder and more frequent. Trump-aligned Republican candidates have since advanced similar false claims in their own campaigns in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections. Scholars, election officials, and even fellow Republican leaders have voiced concerns that Trump’s rhetoric represents a profound threat to the well-being of U.S. democracy. To investigate the capacity for fact-checking efforts to repair the damage incurred by election-related misinformation, in the weeks before the 2020 election, we fielded a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample to test whether exposure to fact-checks of Trump’s false claims increased participants’ confidence in the integrity of the U.S. election and affected their voting behavior. Although our pre-registered analysis offered no evidence that corrections affect voting behavior, our findings do show that exposure to these fact-checks can increase confidence in the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election. However, the effects varied significantly by partisanship, with these changes concentrated among Democrats and Independents.

Understanding public attitudes toward restrictive voting laws in the United States

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Assessing misinformation recall and accuracy perceptions: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

“…However, among low news consumers, the gap in propensity to believe misinformation was substantively small. A better understanding of precisely who is most likely to believe misinformation and why, coupled with recent research on the conditions under which corrections are (and are not) effective (Bailard et al, 2022;Carey et al, 2022), can inform more robust efforts to guard against misinformation.…”

Correcting misinformation about the Russia-Ukraine War reduces false beliefs but does not change views about the War

“…Owing to the long legacy of misinformation in the region, we viewed these experiments as an opportune time to investigate whether increasing the quantity of corrective evidence would change participants' attitudes toward the War. While prior work has shown that exposure to one fact-check has nonexistent to microscopic effects on attitudes [36], other studies find that exposure to multiple fact-checks at once can indeed shift attitudes, albeit not consistently [37]. Providing multiple factchecks simultaneously amounts to providing a larger exogenous shock to those participants' media diet than just one fact-check.…”