Response to Justin Buchler’s review of <i>Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability</i>

Arceneaux, Kevin; Wielen, Ryan J. Vander

doi:10.1017/s1537592718004607

Cited by 43 publications

(79 citation statements)

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“…persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/FMQVWD Note 1. In their study of motivated reasoning, Arceneaux and Vander Wielen (2017) use Need for Cognition (NFC) and NFA to measure people's propensity to be reflective and second-guess their partisan intuitions. In this study, we are less interested in people's willingness to second-guess themselves and more interested in how confident people are in their knowledge.…”

Section: Declaration Of Conflicting Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A little bit of knowledge: Facebook’s News Feed and self-perceptions of knowledge

Anspach

Jennings

Arceneaux

2019

Research & Politics

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Given that approximately half of Internet users use Facebook to access news, it is no surprise that social media are increasingly seen as a viable source of political information. Despite the fact that the average social media user only clicks on a small fraction of political content available in their News Feed, social media use correlates with political knowledge. From where, then, does this knowledge come? We argue that Facebook’s News Feed itself, with its short article previews, provides enough political information for learning to occur. However, this learning comes with an additional consequence: audiences who only read article previews think they know more than they actually do, especially individuals who are motivated to seek emotions. While we are agnostic to the normative implications of such overconfidence, it is worth noting that similar behaviors are associated with political efficacy, knowledge, and participation.

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Section: Declaration Of Conflicting Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A little bit of knowledge: Facebook’s News Feed and self-perceptions of knowledge

Anspach

Jennings

Arceneaux

2019

Research & Politics

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“…A standard explanation in social psychology, cognitive science and political science is that people's current motivations to share hostile political rumors reflect partisan motivations (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017;Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018;Spohr, 2017). Most individuals form partisan identities in adolescence and early adulthood in the form of strong emotional attachments to a political party (Campbell et al, 1960), which influence a range of political and social behaviors (Arceneaux and Vander Wielen, 2017;Cohen, 2003). Deepening political conflict has caused partisans in the U.S. and beyond to develop increasingly hostile feelings toward each other (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012;Mason, 2018), making it natural to presume that deeply committed partisans are willing to strategically share hostile political rumors to target members of the opposing party and, thus, mobilize audiences on behalf of their own party.…”

Section: Helping Your Party or Destroying The System?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors

Petersen¹,

Osmundsen²,

Arceneaux³

2018

Preprint

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Why are some people motivated to share hostile political rumors, such as conspiracy theories and other derogatory news stories? Previous research mostly focuses on the thesis that people’s partisan identities motivate them to share hostile political rumors as a way to tarnish their political opponents. In this manuscript, we demonstrate disruptive psychological motivations also play an important, but often overlooked, role in the spread of hostile rumors. We argue that many individuals who feel socially and politically marginalized are motivated to circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to “burn down” the entire established political order in the hope they can gain status in the process. We conducted 8 large studies (including a nationally representative study) to show that some individuals are predisposed to have a Need for Chaos when facing social isolation and discontent, and that this need is the strongest predictor of explicit motivations to share hostile political rumors. Panel and experimental data show that chaotic motivations reflect an interplay between traits related to status-seeking and states of social exclusion. Consistent with the rising inequality in the United States and beyond, we find that these motivations are strikingly prevalent. To stem the tide of hostile political rumors on social media, the present findings suggest that real-world policy solutions are needed to address the growing social and political frustrations of democratic populations.

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“…Second, symbolic or "affective" preferences are more central to belief networks irrespective of time or sub-population. "Operational" or policy preferences, however, exhibit some increase in centrality over time, but only among the knowledgeable -illustrating, again, an important asymmetry that corroborates the idea that low-information publics may struggle to glean much from informational signals (Price and Zaller 1993;Arceneaux and Vander Wielen 2017;Bakker, Llekes, and Malka 2020). Third, we find that centrality weakly predicts variance.…”

Section: Emily Dickinsonmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…More generally, there is a wider literature on cue-taking that suggests such differences may arise in how information is processed. Arceneaux and Vander Wielen [2017], for example, find evidence of a positive relationship between sophistication and cue up-take; Bakker, Llekes and Malka [2019] demonstrate that informational cues are "best" used by persons with strong rather than weak identities, and political knowledge covaries with these preferences. 5.…”

Section: Theoretical Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Change We Can Believe In: Structural and Content Dynamics within Belief Networks

Fishman¹,

Davis²

2019

Preprint

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Presumably, network analysis supplies an analytical framework for exploring the empirical properties of ideology. This manuscript incorporates two important, though ignored features in past research by inves- tigating how time shapes the properties of belief networks for different populations of people – those who exhibit high and low levels of political knowledge. Subsequent analysis produces several findings: (1) belief network density increases asymmetrically among people with high relative to low knowledge; (2) symbolic preferences are always more central to belief networks irrespective of survey timing or popula- tion; in contrast, policy beliefs exhibit some increase in centrality over time among the politically knowl- edgeable; and, (3) centrality does not predict variance within standard parametric models. This latter finding, in particular, presents problems for describing belief networks using the vernacular of Conversian belief systems – a disconnect that seems grounded in the mismatch between Converse’s individual-level theory and network analysis’ population-based properties.

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Response to Justin Buchler’s review of Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability

Cited by 43 publications

References 0 publications

A little bit of knowledge: Facebook’s News Feed and self-perceptions of knowledge

A little bit of knowledge: Facebook’s News Feed and self-perceptions of knowledge

The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors

Change We Can Believe In: Structural and Content Dynamics within Belief Networks

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