MIT research on how information sources affects voters, shows Trump has a reality distortion field

An MIT study conducted during the 2016 presidential election that saw the “surprise” victory of Donald Trump shows that the sources of the information affect the perception of voters. For all the fact checking and measures to reduce the spread of fake news, what really matters in the end is the personal biases of the voters. The study presented participants with a series of statements to check how partisan beliefs and pre-conceived notions interfered with the evaluations of objective facts.

The study presented voters with both true and false statements made by Trump. For example, Trump claimed that vaccines caused autism, which was not true. Trump presented accurately the true financial costs of the Iraq war. Those who supported Trump believed the claims about vaccines when they were attributed to Trump, but did not believe the same statement when it was presented without attribution. Both Democrats and Republicans who did not support Trump were less likely to believe his statements about the cost of the Iraq war.

The study is called “Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon” and has been published in the Royal Society Open Science journal. Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT and co-author of the paper says, “It wasn’t just the case that misinformation attributed to Trump was less likely to be rejected by Republicans. The things Trump said that were true, if attributed to Trump, made Democrats less likely to believe them. … Trump really does polarise people’s views of reality.”

Self-identified Republicans gave Trump’s statements a belief score of 6 on a scale of 1 to 10, if the statements were attributed, but the belief score fell to 4.5 out of 10 if the same statements were presented without attribution. Self-identified democrats gave the statements a score of 7 if they were not attributed to anyone, the score fell to around 6 out of 10.

Briony Swire, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Western Australia, and co-author of the study said “Using trust — or distrust — of a political figure is one shortcut we all use when it comes to assessing the validity of information.”

Facebook and Google have been accused of allowing misinformation to spread on their services, that allowed Trump to win the elections. Facebook denied the claims, but soon introduced a number of measures to check the spread of fake news on the platform.

Democrats slammed Trump, saying the US could not afford a “Twitter Presidency.” Trump agreed that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter helped him win the election. Big Data analytics company Cambridge Analytica takes at least some of the credit for micromanaging a social media campaign with targeted posts for each individual based on psychographic profiling, as against mass communication.

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