DISINFORMATIONModel Reveals Why Debunking Election Misinformation Often Doesn’t Work
When an election result is disputed, people who are skeptical about the outcome may be swayed to accept the fairness and integrity of the election. A new study identifies factors that can make these efforts more successful.
When an election result is disputed, people who are skeptical about the outcome may be swayed by figures of authority who come down on one side or the other. Those figures can be independent monitors, political figures, or news organizations. However, these “debunking” efforts don’t always have the desired effect, and in some cases, they can lead people to cling more tightly to their original position.
Neuroscientists and political scientists at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley have now created a computational model that analyzes the factors that help to determine whether debunking efforts will persuade people to change their beliefs about the legitimacy of an election. Their findings suggest that while debunking fails much of the time, it can be successful under the right conditions.
For instance, the model showed that successful debunking is more likely if people are less certain of their original beliefs and if they believe the authority is unbiased or strongly motivated by a desire for accuracy. It also helps when an authority comes out in support of a result that goes against a bias they are perceived to hold: for example, Fox News declaring that Joseph R. Biden had won in Arizona in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
“When people see an act of debunking, they treat it as a human action and understand it the way they understand human actions — that is, as something somebody did for their own reasons,” says Rebecca Saxe, the John W. Jarve Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study. “We’ve used a very simple, general model of how people understand other people’s actions, and found that that’s all you need to describe this complex phenomenon.”
The findings could have implications as the United States prepares for the presidential election taking place on Nov. 5, as they help to reveal the conditions that would be most likely to result in people accepting the election outcome.
MIT graduate student Setayesh Radkani is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in a special election-themed issue of the journal PNAS Nexus. Marika Landau-Wells PhD ’18, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, is also an author of the study.
