Are liberals less likely than conservatives to fall for propaganda?

For reasons that evolutionary psychologists have expounded, human beings exhibit certain biases in their beliefs about the world. In the context of a developed society, biases in perceptions of social realities can potentially be influenced by political beliefs. When this occurs it is referred to as politically motivated reasoning (PMR). As Carter and McKenna explain:

‘If a subject engages in politically motivated reasoning when assessing some evidence or argument, their assessment of that evidence or argument is nontrivially influenced by their background political beliefs. If the evidence or argument causes trouble for those beliefs, they try to reject it, explain it away, or minimize its importance; if the evidence or argument supports those beliefs, they enthusiastically endorse it, and exaggerate its importance.’ (Carter and McKenna 2020, 706)

An interesting feature of academic discussions in the West today is that the problem of politically motivated reasoning is attributed more to holders of conservative beliefs and values. Thus a claim that has come to be widely shared is that the vulnerability to being misled by faulty information is a bigger problem for conservatives than for liberals.

In what follows I shall look critically at arguments for that claim and suggest that, rather than succeeding, they actually illustrate how academics who advance them may be vulnerable to ideological deception and self-deception.

Liberals on their good fortune

I am not suggesting that all liberals necessarily subscribe to this view, but influential arguments for it are encountered in the academic literature. One there finds such claims as that people with liberal political views enjoy an epistemic advantage over people with conservative political views for it is their good fortune to know better which epistemic sources are more worthy of trust. ‘Liberals are epistemically luckier’ writes Neil Levy, for instance, ‘they are disposed to defer to the most competent individuals and institutions’ (Levy 2019, 322). He indicates the basis of his comparison:

‘Whereas for liberals chains of deference trace back to the relevant scientific experts, and therefore to properly constituted collective deliberation, conservatives’ chains of deference end in ‘merchants of doubt’ (Oreskes and Conway 2010), or maverick scientists.’ (Levy 2019, 322)

The ‘merchants of doubt’ would typically be scientists backed by those with a business interest vested in opposing certain findings. As for ‘maverick scientists’, Levy presumably has in mind those scientists who question what the public is told is a scientific consensus. Yet regarding his basic assumption that conservatives more than liberals are liable to be duped by special interest groups Levy offers no specific warrant.

A readiness to attribute an epistemic advantage to liberals over conservatives is however not unusual in liberal academic circles. It is also accepted by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen when referring to what Yochai Benkler and colleagues claim is evidence for it in ‘asymmetric propaganda’. He writes:

‘As Benkler et. al. carefully document, in the period around the 2016 election, the network dynamics of the right-wing media ecosystem were entirely different from the network dynamics of the mainstream/left ecosystem. On the right, false reporting was promulgated and largely went unchecked. On the left and center, false reporting was often initially promulgated — and then quickly discovered and criticized by a different media outlet.’ (Nguyen 2021, 8)

Explaining the ‘reality-check dynamic’ that they attribute to the mainstream media, Benkler et al claim ‘aggressive fact-checking is incentivized — catching another media outlet’s mistake counts as “getting the scoop”.’ Regarding the news around the 2016 presidential election, as Nguyen summarises:

‘Errors were quickly discovered, which almost always led to retractions, wide-spread reporting of retractions, firing, and other standard performances of the apparatus of journalistic objectivity. In short, the mainstream/left-wing ecosystem was a large and unified network that contained actors who conformed to norms of objective journalism and were incentivized to find errors in their brethren. And their audience treated these various actors as in conversation and beholden to each other. These dynamics tend to keep the whole system mostly honest.’ (Ngueyen 2021, 8)

In contrast to this remarkably sanguine view of the integrity of the ‘mainstream/left-wing’ media, which is oblivious to the deceptions of the Steele Dossier and RussiaGate, they depict the opposing ‘ecosystem’ as a breeding ground for ‘disinformation’ and ‘conspiracy theories’.

But how clear is their evidence for this? A case Benkler et al highlight as an especially significant illustration is the ‘Seth Rich conspiracy theory’. This was sparked by the announcement from Wikileaks, who had published a trove of about 20,000 emails with damaging implications for the DNC (Buncombe 2016), that they were offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the killer of DNC staffer Seth Rich (Tani 2016). Benkler et al comment:

‘No single case more clearly exhibits the characteristics of a disinformation campaign aimed to divert attention from the president’s political woes than Fox News’s coverage in May of 2017 of the conspiracy theory that DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered because he, rather than state-backed Russian hackers, was the source of the DNC emails disclosed in the middle of the 2016 campaign.’ (Benkler et al 2018, 159)

Yet this is a remarkable cluster of claims from Benkler and colleagues given that they do not say how they know the truth about the sourcing of those emails or the fate of Seth Rich, and they cite no facts that would show the ‘conspiracy theory’ to be false. Nor do they comment on how the dispute about the emails’ provenance itself served the political purpose of diverting attention from the significance of their contents. So, it is worth noting that the FBI has been caught lying about the matter, both in court and in response to Freedom of Information requests (Ty Clevenger 2020): after giving affidavits in 2019 claiming it had no records on Seth Rich, a FOIA request not directly mentioning Seth Rich fortuitously elicited ‘two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have “Seth Rich” as their heading.’ (Murray 2020) These emails were heavily redacted, and so it is theoretically possible that they contained nothing to contradict the official story, but that would leave a puzzle as to why their demonstration of this would have been redacted. More important, however, is this further point Craig Murray makes:

‘the FBI was at this time supposed to be in the early stages of an investigation into how the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks. The FBI here believed Wikileaks to be indicating the material had been leaked by Seth Rich who had then been murdered. Surely in any legitimate investigation, the investigators would have been absolutely compelled to check out the truth of this possibility, rather than treat it as a media issue? … If the FBI genuinely, as they claim, did not even look at the murder of Seth Rich, that would surely be the most damning fact of all and reveal their “investigation” was entirely agenda driven from the start.’ (Craig Murray 2020)

Since the killer of Seth Rich has not been identified, there is no obviously rational basis for dismissing one speculative hypothesis (that he was thereby prevented from testifying about the emails) in favour of another (that he was killed in a robbery, even though nothing was stolen). In choosing to showcase such a problematic example, Benkler et al give the appearance of being influenced more by ‘politically motivated reasoning’ (PMR) than by dispassionate assessment of the evidence. Furthermore, the singling out of their study by a philosopher like Nguyen reinforces reasons to question the allegedly greater resilience of liberals in the face of propaganda.

But let us turn to consider three arguments offered by liberal academics in justification of their view that political conservatives are more likely than they are to succumb to motivated reasoning.

Three arguments for the asymmetry claim, with replies

According to one argument, the claim of asymmetry is ‘rooted in decades of research demonstrating that right-wing citizens score higher than left-wing citizens on measures of epistemic needs for certainty and related traits, such as dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity’ (Guay and Johnston (2022). However, research conducted by Guay and Johnston shows that while there is definite evidential support for the claim that right-leaning citizens show a greater general need for certainty, this appears to have no particular correlation with politically motivated reasoning. Nor is there any good reason to suppose it should, for although a need for certainty can make one slow to accept new ideas, it can also motivate one to check that the old ones are as safe as has hitherto been assumed. So it is not clear how this would tell one way or another with regard to epistemic rigour and reliability.

A second argument involves the claim that conservatives are more likely than liberals to be influenced in their beliefs about facts by their normative commitments. Yet while there are some studies that claim to show this is so, there are also many others suggesting it is not: in the largest synthetic study of the empirical literature to date, Peter H. Ditto and colleagues ‘meta-analyzed the results of 51 experimental studies, involving over 18,000 participants, that examined one form of partisan bias— the tendency to evaluate otherwise identical information more favorably when it supports one’s political beliefs or allegiances than when it challenges those beliefs or allegiances.’ They assessed the support offered for asymmetry vs symmetry hypotheses and found that ‘some studies showed very little partisan bias and others showed a great deal of bias.’ (Ditto et al 2019, 280) Importantly, this applied to both sides: ‘studies ranged from showing substantially greater bias for liberals than for conservatives to showing substantially greater bias for conservatives than for liberals.’ Their results led them to pronounce in favour of symmetry:

‘whether partisan bias was aggregated separately for liberals and conservatives or compared within each study and then aggregated, our results suggest that liberals and conservatives were both significantly biased in favor of information that supported their ideological beliefs and groups, and the two groups were biased to very similar degrees.’ (Ditto et al 2019, 280)

However, a criticism of this meta-analysis is that it does not take account of the need to control for the potential effects of previously formed rational beliefs as distinct from those caused by PMR. Ben M. Tappin and colleagues point out that the design of the studies discussed conflated prior factual beliefs and political group motivation, overlooking how ‘prior factual beliefs can affect reasoning in the absence of an effect of political group motivation; and, thus, cognitive sophistication could simply be magnifying the former instead of the latter effect.’ (Tappin et al (2021, 1107) Simply demonstrating the influence of prior beliefs does not show whether that influence is due to irrational motivation or a rational epistemic commitment. For ‘the true source of the alleged bias may be purely cognitive, with no motivation involved—that is, purely a case of beliefs affecting beliefs rather than desires affecting beliefs.’ (Baron and Jost 2019, 296)

It is on the basis of this consideration that a third argument in favour of the asymmetry thesis is advanced. Baron and Jost introduce it by reference to a seminal paper of Charles Lord and colleagues:

‘There can be no real quarrel with a willingness to infer that studies supporting one’s theory-based expectations are more probative than . . . studies that contradict one’s expectations. . . . Hence, [a] physicist would be “biased,” but appropriately so, if a new procedure for evaluating the speed of light were accepted if it gave the “right answer” but rejected if it gave the “wrong answer.” The same bias leads most of us to be skeptical about reports of miraculous virgin births or herbal cures for cancer.’ (Lord et al 1979, 2106)

Appealing to this insight, Baron and Jost (2019) argue that while both conservatives and liberals may be similarly susceptible to the influence of their respective biases, there is a qualitative difference in the biases themselves, in terms of their epistemic reliability. They maintain that

‘liberals generally score higher than conservatives on measures of integrative complexity, cognitive reflection, need for cognition, and uncertainty tolerance, whereas conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of personal needs for order and structure, cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, cognitive or perceptual rigidity, and dogmatism…’ (Baron and Jost 2019, 293)

These comparisons favour liberals they believe, and they claim there is also ‘a good deal of evidence that liberals perform better than conservatives on objective tests of cognitive ability and intelligence’. Conservatives, by contrast, ‘appear to be more gullible’, ‘less interested in scientific ways of knowing’ and ‘score higher than liberals on measures of self-deception’. (Baron and Jost 2019, 293)

One might expect conservatives to find this all highly tendentious, and they could point to findings that while liberals engage in more complex deliberation on some topics, conservatives score more highly for complex thought on others, which ‘calls into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals in a domain-general way.’ (Conway et al 2015, 1) Yet, irrespective of the merits of these claims and counter-claims, the point to emphasise is that there are two good reasons for questioning the relevance of such claims about cognitive sophistication for ascertaining differential epistemic competence.

One reason stems from a finding that appears to have been widely confirmed in the literature: resistance to uncongenial information increases with cognitive sophistication. Citing research on this, Carter and McKenna summarise the likely reason:

‘Put simply, politically sophisticated subjects have more information at their disposal, and the more information you have at your disposal, the better you will be at finding flaws in arguments with conclusions you don’t like, and the better you will be at seeking out information that confirms rather than challenges your existing views.’ (Carter and McKenna 2020, 704)

Correspondingly, Tappin et al (2021) refer to the well-evidenced observation that ‘disagreement over policy-relevant facts often tends to be largest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans.’ They cite numerous studies showing that this applies not only with regard to general levels of educational attainment but also ‘more specific cognitive indicators, such as science literacy and science intelligence, numeracy, domain knowledge, and measures of open-minded and analytic thinking’. On major issues like anthropogenic global warming and the safety of vaccinations, ‘the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans tend to be the furthest apart in their beliefs about the relevant facts of the matter.’ This means that the allegedly greater sophistication of liberal thought, even if it were verified, would not necessarily provide the basis of an epistemically sounder position on any particular controversy. For sophistication in reasoning does not always track the truth of the matter.

This might give us pause regarding claims like ‘conservatives are more likely than liberals to spread “fake news,” political misinformation, and conspiracy theories’. For it is far from clear, when it comes to judgement in any particular case, that liberals will necessarily be on firmer epistemic ground than others who take a different view of it.

A second reason why the allegedly greater sophistication of liberals is irrelevant to ascertaining epistemic competence becomes evident when we consider that their claim to be on firmer epistemic ground is based on the supporting belief, as articulated in the quote from Levy at the start of this article, that they defer to more credible epistemic authorities. Sophisticated reasons can be offered for this deference, but as was argued in my earlier paper on the epistemic status of ‘official stories’ (Hayward 2023), the epistemic authorities they have in mind may not be always be the most reliable when the matter to be settled is the kind of controversy regarding which accusations of fake news, political misinformation, and conspiracy theories fly. For while we can reliably enough identify the authorities that support well-established bodies of knowledge, more controversial knowledge claims involve a challenge to those authorities, and it would be question-begging to dismiss a challenge just because it departs from received wisdom. To do so is especially unwise when the authority appealed to is not a body of independent scientific work but that of a partisan consensus or reports mediated by corporate journalists. Yet when it comes to discussing cases, this is what liberals who hold this position sometimes do. Baron and Jost, for instance, are ready to cite findings from Benkler et al whose epistemic judgement regarding real cases was questioned above. They further cite as if self-evidently illustrative of conservatives’ epistemic incompetence such examples as entertaining hypotheses of nefarious doings by figures like Hillary Clinton and George Soros or giving credence to the claim that ‘there is no compelling evidence that Russia covertly influenced the 2016 presidential election.’ Yet given that Soros’s CV includes leading a speculative attack on the British pound in 1992 (Elliott 2023), funding consequential political protest movements in several countries (As`ad AbuKhalil 2023) and profiteering from insider trading, including on currency trades, while Clinton is on record as ‘joking’ about assassinating Julian Assange (LaCapria 2016) and laughing in celebration at the assassination she helped orchestrate of Muammar Gaddafi (Daly 2011), it is not obviously less rational to keep an open mind rather than claim certain knowledge of what they might be capable of. Regarding the lack of evidence for Russian influence on the 2016 election, acknowledging it was the rational position, as has since been positively affirmed (Tucker and Merchant 2023 citing Durham 2023). As with the Seth Rich example, this is part of a pattern that occurs with some regularity and shows that when liberal academics give concrete examples of their superior epistemic discernment they are at risk of demonstrating the opposite.

Perhaps, then, it would be better to accept that different people have different vulnerabilities to deception and that it is not necessarily helpful to suppose that variations track differences in political or ideological commitments. As for trusting in the procedures and integrity of mainstream media, this can be rational up to a point, but up to which point may vary from case to case. The same goes, of course, for distrust.

Conclusion

The idea that conservatives are more vulnerable than liberals to being influenced by propaganda does not seem to be well-evidenced. In view of this, it may be better for all concerned if controversial issues are considered on their merits rather than treated as reflexes of ideological packages of thought. If academics are to steer a reasonable course between credulousness and cynicism they should focus attention on the quality of argument and evidence rather than their provenance. A benefit of this would be that views at variance with the liberal mainstream would not be unreflectively dismissed as ‘right-wing disinformation’. Academics, meanwhile, could then be addressing the more helpful question of what it is that makes any of us more or less susceptible than others to the influence of propaganda.

Image from X post by Philip Wallach

This post is planned to be the basis of a section in my forthcoming book on Propaganda and the University, so comments and critiques are very welcome!