Do supporters lose faith in politicians when they realise they have been lied to?
A postdoctoral researcher at the Northeastern University, Briony Swire-Thompson was in a team which conducted a study to test whether people would lose faith in politicians who appeared to tell more lies than truths. The team presented 1,500 U.S residents with a series of statements from either Bernie Sanders, a Democrat, or President Donald Trump, a Republican. They chose Sanders and Trump because these leaders are politically, on the left and right. Half the group got Trump statements and half got Sanders statements. Actual statements made by Trump and Sanders were given to the group. In cases where the statement was false or misleading, the researchers labeled it as such and provided people with the correct information alongside the false claim.
Swire-Thompson and her colleagues wanted to see whether people who supported Trump and Sanders would lose faith in the politicians if they were shown many more false statements than true statements. Swire-Thompson said, “We thought that maybe the true and false statements were balancing each other out, in a way.” Hence, they wondered, would an unequal ratio tip the scales? And yes, it did tip the scale but barely. The study found out that feelings toward politicians did not shift much, if at all when corrections were encountered in the experiment. The results were the same for Democrats and Republicans.
Even though the experiment didn’t explicitly test for why people’s opinions didn’t change, Swire-Thompson believes that it could just be that people don’t have much faith in politicians. So there’s not much room for change. “Politicians are well-known not to have high credibility scores,” she commented.
Shahjadi Jemim Rahman
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