DEMOCRACY WATCH How Polarization Drives Republicans to Spread Misinformation
Researchers say people most likely to spread misinformation are Republicans, i.e., conservatives, but mainly only under certain conditions. “Both liberals and conservatives have a baseline tendency to do this,” says one expert, “but we see these big spikes only among the Republicans when they’re in a situation that feels like there is political conflict. When they’re in a competitive situation, Republicans want to win—almost at any cost.”
Believe it or not, when COVID-19 first hit the United States in 2020, opinions across the country about the virus were not particularly polarized. But as election season approached, something dramatically shifted. Suddenly opinions about COVID-19 were dividing politically, and social media was flooded with misinformation. What happened?
Trying to understand this phenomenon is what prompted Cornelia (Connie) Pechmann, professor of marketing at the UCI Merage School of Business, and Xiajing Zhu, Ph.D. marketing candidate, to dive into the data to seek answers. After years of research, their study went beyond merely looking at the polarization around COVID to explore how polarization relates to the spread of misinformation.
The resulting research, “Political Polarization Triggers Conservatives’ Misinformation Spread to Attain Ingroup Dominance,” was published online in the Journal of Marketing on June 16, 2024.
The Spread of Misinformation Differs Among Partisan Groups
Their initial idea looked at how misinformation evolved around the topic of COVID prior to the election and after election season started. “We didn’t find much difference in the beginning between Republicans or Democrats spreading misinformation,” says Zhu, “but as election season came, we began to see much more misinformation coming from the Republican side about COVID. I was curious why so many people were posting misinformation on social media. Why do we see so much more misinformation in 2020 compared to before the election?” Zhu wanted to understand the context of the “what, why, and who.”
Pechmann says Zhu is an expert at collecting big data. “We started by looking at Facebook pages to get some idea about what was happening,” says Pechmann. “Then we looked at research in psychology and found it showed that Republicans, i.e., conservatives, were primarily the ones spreading misinformation online. Researcher John Jost, professor of psychology at NYU, confirmed that for us as well. There were theories about this, but no one was sure why it happened.” It seemed to be a pattern, and more studies confirmed this was true. Zhu suggested misinformation and polarization were related. “The more we explored, the more we kept finding that pattern,” Pechmann says.
Interpreting Misinformation vs. Disinformation from an Outsider’s Perspective
Pechmann was fascinated with Zhu’s interpretation of the research results. “She’s from China,” says Pechmann. “They don’t have a two-party system in China. They don’t have a free press, so Zhu learned about our culture and our politics at the same time.”
