Political Orientation Predicts Credulity Regarding Putative Hazards
Abstract
To benefit from information provided by other people, people must be somewhat credulous. However, credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing misinformation and failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, given that disregarding accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no equivalent asymmetry exists for information concerning benefits, people should generally be more credulous of hazard information than of benefit information. This adaptive negatively biased credulity is linked to negativity bias in general and is more prominent among people who believe the world to be more dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and beliefs about the dangerousness of the world differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively correlate with negatively biased credulity. Two online studies of Americans supported this prediction, potentially illuminating how politicians’ alarmist claims affect different portions of the electorate.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Mar 31, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1177/0956797617692108
Entities
People
- Anne C. Pisor
- Colin Holbrook
- Daniel M. T. Fessler
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
- University of California
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of California, Santa Barbara