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"Exaggerated feelings of moral superiority" make liberals vulnerable to believing fake news, according to a study which looked at stories relating to Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump.Researchers at Nottingham Trent University
found liberals and conservatives are equally likely to believe untrue news stories that correspond to their worldview and dismiss factual information that undermines it, but that their reasons for doing so differ.
While right-wingers "followed their gut instinct" in order to judge the veracity of news, high levels of "collective narcissism" - strong belief in the righteousness of their ideology and of others who share it - affected how liberals respond to stories.
Examining the concept of "fake news", Dr. Craig Harper and Professor Thom Baguley carried out three studies to look at people's responses to true and invented news articles relating to Trump and Brexit.
After asking 722 Americans to read a positive or negative invented story about either the U.S. President or his predecessor Barack Obama, the researchers found that
while participants were quite good at recognising an article was fake, they still rated the story that was favourable to their ideology as having more truth than the one that contradicted it.
The second study, which saw 570 UK residents split into 'Leave' and 'Remain' voters read one pro-Brexit story and one which was opposed to the EU referendum outcome, revealed participants tended to be much more sceptical about the article that went against their worldview.
Researchers set out to understand why these reactions took place with the third study, in which a sample of 904 Americans with views ranging across the political spectrum read one positive and one negative story about President Trump, both of which were true.
Displaying the same trends as in the previous research, with participants rating the stories as more or less legitimate based on their political opinions, the study found tha
t high collective narcissism drove liberals' confidence in the anti-Trump piece.While conservatives displayed some degree of collective narcissism in their response to the positive story about Trump the effect was not statistically significant, according to the study, which found that right wingers who said they were guided by intuition were more likely than other participants to believe both stories.
Presenting the study at the British Psychological Society annual conference on Wednesday, Dr. Harper said: "The concept of fake news has taken hold of political discourse since the election of President Trump in 2016, leading to the de-legitimisation of media outlets across the Western world on ideological or political grounds."
"In these studies we have shown that both Liberals and Conservatives are equally likely to believe fake news. The psychological motivations associated differ between the two groups though.
"Liberals believe news stories to maintain a favourable feeling about their own group. But Conservatives believe news stories because of a tendency to use their gut instincts.
"Understanding the similarities and differences between groups will be important as we seek to develop strategies to reduce the growing tide of political polarisation in our democratic societies."
Since Americans put Trump in the White House and Britain elected to leave the EU, there have been significant attempts to crack down on so-called fake news, with globalist media outlets and politicians across the West insisting that the anti-establishment votes and populist sentiment were driven by the phenomenon.
The European Commission, as well as national governments in the bloc, have
unveiled a series of measures over the last few years designed to stamp out "fake news" on social media, almost all of which are
bundled in with action to tackle so-called hate speech.
Algorithm changes put into effect by Facebook earlier this year, with the stated goal of fighting fake news, have given a huge boost to the liberal, establishment media while "crushing" conservative news sites,
according to a data-drive report by the
Western Journal in March.
If someone could honestly evaluate this study, they would first find that such a bell curve is, relative to truth, wholly and artificially confined into a hyper-restricted "window of possible and acceptable reality"; which would be effectively equivalent to a population group whose consensus thought processes are found in those 535 people whose respective 'perspectives' on claims of 'true news' vs. 'fake news' (the critical commonality and issue here); and whose underlying presumptions run between these supposed extremes:
A) at the most 'left', that the US is somehow a "Special State" and clearly 'morally superior' than most countries; and,
B) all the way to the rightmost's "USA as THE 'Indispensable' country, a/k/a, the only country deserving of consideration with regard to any event anywhere .
I'm confident that I could look up the details of the study and shred its methods, relevance et al. due to many flaws in the population selection, the questions, et alia, of which some flaws of might well probably supersede this sole one I've quickly touched upon here: the above thoroughly restricted 'window of reality', (which seems to have been at least a part of the cause as to why most study participants apparently caught most of the "fake news.") All of those events are highly relevant to the 'fake news' (non) issue and yet I can almost guarantee that you will see that the study's 'window of reality' does not look out at, nor consider, these and other matters most pertinent to claims of claims of 'fake news', as it's impossible to view or take into consideration those most relevant of events from from the restricted view of that window.
R.C.
* Granted, such studies are always subjective, but the degree of subjectivity required to here be involved is far, far too high.
**Whose scope/bell curve width was significantly restricted with the loss of a single member of Congress, Dr. Ron Paul. If a study population can be that significantly modified by the loss of 1 of 535
persons, then it's a poor population for transferring findings to others, which is the essence of statistics.
RC