‘Political beliefs mar judgment’
Learning about someone’s political beliefs interferes with a person’s ability to assess expertise, as people judge like-minded peers as being more expert in fields completely unrelated to politics, according to a University College London study released this week.
Researchers found that people turned to peers with similar political views for help with a task that had nothing to do with politics, instead of seeking help from someone who performed the task better but didn’t share their political leanings, according to the paper, which was published in Cognition.
“Our findings have implications for the spread of false news, for political polarization and for social divisions,” said the study’s senior author, Prof. Tali Sharot. “If we are aware of a person’s political leanings, for example on social media, we will be more likely to accept their take on a myriad of issues without scrutiny.”
The researchers from UCL and Harvard University tasked 97 participants with categorizing geometric shapes based on their features. The participants were told whether their answers were correct, and were also shown the answers of four “co-players” who had completed the same task. The “co-players” were actually computer algorithms designed to perform the task either extremely well or relatively poorly.
While completing the task, participants were also asked whether they agreed or disagreed with a number of political statements, such as “Immigration gives a boost to the national economy.” The participants saw how their “co-players” answered these questions. The researchers predetermined that some of the “co-players” would mostly agree with the participants on political issues, while others would mostly disagree.
During a second stage of the experiment, the participants were shown a new set of shapes and were asked to categorize them correctly, and promised a financial reward that depended on their performance. Again, players had an opportunity to view the answer of one of their co-players before making their final decision.
In order to increase their chances of answering correctly, the participants should have chosen to hear from those who had already demonstrated expertise on the specific task, regardless of political views. Instead, participants sought and then followed the advice of the politically like-minded co-player, even when a politically dissimilar one was better at the task.
“When we examined participants’ impressions of the ‘co-players’, we found they overestimated how good the politically like-minded were at the shape categorization task,” Sharot said. “This misperception drove the participants to seek advice from the politically like-minded.”