Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-dlb68 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-14T22:00:05.613Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Measuring Misperceptions?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2022

MATTHEW H. GRAHAM Open the ORCID record for MATTHEW H. GRAHAM [Opens in a new window]
MATTHEW H. GRAHAM*
Affiliation:
Temple University, United States
*
Matthew H. Graham, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Temple University, United States, [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Survey data are commonly cited as evidence of widespread misperceptions and misinformed beliefs. This paper shows that surveys generally fail to identify the firm, deep, steadfast, confidently held beliefs described in leading accounts. Instead, even those who report 100% certain belief in falsehoods about well-studied topics like climate change, vaccine side effects, and the COVID-19 death toll exhibit substantial response instability over time. Similar levels of response stability are observed among those who report 100% certain belief in benign, politically uncontested falsehoods—for example, that electrons are larger than atoms and that lasers work by focusing sound waves. As opposed to firmly held misperceptions, claims to be highly certain of incorrect answers are best interpreted as “miseducated” guesses based on mistaken inferential reasoning. Those reporting middling and low levels of certainty are best viewed as making close-to-blind guesses. These findings recast existing evidence as to the prevalence, predictors, correction, and consequences of misperceptions and misinformed beliefs.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 117 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 80 - 102
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Achen, Christopher H. 1975. “Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response.” The American Political Science Review 69 (4):1218–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahler, Douglas J., and Broockman, David E.. 2018. “The Delegate Paradox: Why Polarized Politicians Can Represent Citizens Best.” The Journal of Politics 80 (4): 1117–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Franklin. 1987. “Discovering Personal Probabilities When Utility Functions Are Unknown.” Management Science 33 (4): 542–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Angrist, Joshua D., and Pischke, Jorn-Steffen. 2008. Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist’s Companion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, Rodden, Jonathan, and Snyder, James M.. 2008. “The Strength of Issues: Using Multiple Measures to Gauge Preference Stability, Ideological Constraint, and Issue Voting.” American Political Science Review 102 (2): 215–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronow, Peter M., and Miller, Benjamin T.. 2019. Foundations of Agnostic Statistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bassili, John N. 1996. “Meta-Judgmental versus Operative Indexes of Psychological Attributes: The Case of Measures of Attitude Strength.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (4): 637–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berinsky, Adam J. 2017. “Rumors and Health Care Reform: Experiments in Political Misinformation.” British Journal of Political Science 47 (2): 241–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berinsky, Adam J. 2018. “Telling the Truth about Believing the Lies? Evidence for the Limited Prevalence of Expressive Survey Responding.” The Journal of Politics 80 (1): 211–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernardin, H. John, and Buckley, M. Ronald. 1981. “Strategies in Rater Training.” The Academy of Management Review 6 (2): 205–12.Google Scholar
Brotherton, Robert, French, Christopher C., and Pickering, Alan D.. 2013. “Measuring Belief in Conspiracy Theories: The Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale.” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (279): 1–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bullock, John G., Gerber, Alan S., Hill, Seth J., and Huber, Gregory A.. 2015. “Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10:1–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bullock, John G., and Lenz, Gabriel. 2019. “Partisan Bias in Surveys.” Annual Review of Political Science 22:325–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clifford, Scott, and Jerit, Jennifer. 2016. “Cheating on Political Knowledge Questions in Online Surveys: An Assessment of the Problem and Solutions.” Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (4): 858–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Converse, Philip E. 1964. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” In Ideology and Discontent, ed. Apter, David E., 206–61. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Converse, Philip E. 1970. “Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue.” In The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems, ed. Tufte, Edward R., 168–89. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Converse, Philip E. 2000. “Assessing the Capacity of Mass Electorates.” Annual Review of Political Science 3:331–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diedenhofen, Birk, and Musch, Jochen. 2017. “PageFocus: Using Paradata to Detect and Prevent Cheating on Online Achievement Tests.” Behavior Research Methods 49 (4): 1444–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ducharme, Wesley M., and Donnell, Michael L.. 1973. “Intrasubject Comparison of Four Response Modes for ‘Subjective Probability’ Assessment.” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 10 (1): 108–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erikson, Robert S. 1979. “The SRC Panel Data and Mass Political Attitudes.” British Journal of Political Science 9 (1): 89–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flynn, D. J. 2016. “The Scope and Correlates of Political Misperceptions in the Mass Public.” Unpublished Manuscript.Google Scholar
Flynn, D. J., Nyhan, Brendan, and Reifler, Jason. 2017. “The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs about Politics.” Political Psychology 38 (S1): 127–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foley, Richard. 1992. “The Epistemology of Belief and the Epistemology of Degrees of Belief.” American Philosophical Quarterly 29 (2): 111–24.Google Scholar
Gerber, Alan S., and Green, Donald. 2012. Field Experiments. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Gilens, Martin. 2001. “Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences.” American Political Science Review 95 (2): 379–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilens, Martin. 2012. “Citizen Competence and Democratic Governance.” In New Directions in Public Opinion, ed. Berinsky, Adam J., 52–76. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Graham, Matthew H. 2022. “Replication Data for: Measuring Misperceptions?” Harvard Dataverse. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SBXFXC.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, Matthew H. 2020. “Self-Awareness of Political Knowledge.” Political Behavior 42 (1): 305–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, Matthew H. 2021. “‘We Don’t Know’ Means ‘They’re Not Sure.’” Public Opinion Quarterly 85 (2): 571–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grigorieff, Alexis, Roth, Christopher, and Ubfal, Diego. 2020. “Does Information Change Attitudes towards Immigrants? Representative Evidence from Survey Experiments.” Demography 57 (3): 1117–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guay, Brian. 2021. “Misinformed or Uninformed? The Prevalence and Consequences of Certainty in Political Misperceptions.” Unpublished Manuscript. Duke University.Google Scholar
Guess, Andrew, Nagler, Jonathan, and Tucker, Joshua. 2019. “Less Than You Think: Prevalence and Predictors of Fake News Dissemination on Facebook.” Science Advances 5 (1): article eaau4586.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hellwig, Timothy, and Marinova, Dani M.. 2015. “More Misinformed than Myopic: Economic Retrospections and the Voter’s Time Horizon.” Political Behavior 37 (4): 865–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Seth J. 2017. “Learning Together Slowly: Bayesian Learning about Political Facts.” The Journal of Politics 79 (4): 1403–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, Jennifer L., and Einstein, Katherine Levine. 2015. Do Facts Matter? Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Holt, Charles A., and Smith, Angela M.. 2016. “Belief Elicitation with a Synchronized Lottery Choice Menu That Is Invariant to Risk Attitudes.” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 8 (1): 110–39.Google Scholar
Hopkins, Daniel J., and King, Gary. 2010. “Improving Anchoring Vignettes: Designing Surveys to Correct Interpersonal Comparability.” Public Opinion Quarterly 74 (2): 201–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, Daniel J., Sides, John, and Citrin, Jack. 2019. “The Muted Consequences of Correct Information about Immigration.” The Journal of Politics 81 (1): 315–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jerit, Jennifer, and Barabas, Jason. 2012. “Partisan Perceptual Bias and the Information Environment.” The Journal of Politics 74 (3): 672–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jerit, Jennifer, and Zhao, Yangzi. 2020. “Political Misinformation.” Annual Review of Political Science 23:77–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Julious, Steven A. 2004. “Using Confidence Intervals around Individual Means to Assess Statistical Significance between Two Means.” Pharmaceutical Statistics 3 (3): 217–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary, Christopher, J. L. Murray, Health, World, and Salomon, Joshua A.. 2004. “Enhancing the of Measurement in Survey Research.” American Political Science Review 98 (1): 191–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krosnick, Jon A. 1988. “Attitude Importance and Attitude Change.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 24 (3): 240–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuklinski, James H., Quirk, Paul J., Schwieder, David W., and Rich, Robert F.. 1998. “‘Just the Facts, Ma’am’: Political Facts and Public Opinion Source.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 560 (November): 143–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuklinski, James H., Quirk, Paul J., Jerit, Jennifer, Schwieder, David, and Rich, Robert F.. 2000. “Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship.” The Journal of Politics 62 (3): 790–816.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kull, Steven. 2011. Preserving American Public Support for Foreign Aid. In From Aid to Global Development Cooperation, ed. 57–60. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Lawrence, Eric D., and Sides, John. 2014. “The Consequences of Political Innumeracy.” Research & Politics, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168014545414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lazer, David M. J., Baum, Matthew A., Benkler, Yochai, Berinsky, Adam J., Greenhill, Kelly M., Menczer, Filippo, Metzger, Miriam J., et al. 2018. “The Science of Fake News.” Science 359 (6380): 1094–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lee, Nathan, Flynn, D. J., and Nyhan, Brendan. 2017. “Political Misperceptions among Public Officials and the General Public.” Evidence in Governance and Politics Pre-Registration Document.Google Scholar
Lee, Nathan, Flynn, D. J., Nyhan, Brendan, and Reifler, Jason. 2021. “More Accurate, But No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public.” British Journal of Political Science 51 (3): 1315–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Seonghui, and Matsuo, Akitaka. 2018. “Decomposing Political Knowledge: What Is Confidence in Knowledge and Why It Matters.” Electoral Studies 51 (1): 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeper, Thomas J. 2014. “Are Important Attitudes More Stable? No, Not Really.” Unpublished Manuscript.Google Scholar
Lewandowsky, Stephan, Ullrich, K. H. Ecker, Seifert, Colleen M., Schwarz, Norbert, and Cook, John. 2012. “Misinformation and Its Correction.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13 (3): 106–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Li, Jianing, and Wagner, Michael W.. 2020. “The Value of Not Knowing: Partisan Cue-Taking and Belief Updating of the Uninformed, the Ambiguous, and the Misinformed.” Journal of Communication 70 (5): 646–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trujillo, Lunz, Kristin, Matthew Motta, Callaghan, Timothy, and Sylvester, Steven. 2021. “Correcting Misperceptions about the MMR Vaccine: Using Psychological Risk Factors to Inform Targeted Communication Strategies.” Political Research Quarterly 74 (2): 434–78.Google Scholar
Luskin, Robert C., Sood, Guarav, and Blank, Joshua. 2018. “Misinformation about Misinformation: Of Headlines and Survey Design.” Unpublished Manuscript.Google Scholar
Luskin, Robert C., and Bullock, John G.. 2011. “‘Don’t Know’ Means ‘Don’t Know’: DK Responses and the Public’s Level of Political Knowledge.” The Journal of Politics 73 (2): 547–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marchlewska, Marta, Cichocka, Aleksandra, and Kossowska, Małgorzata. 2018. “Addicted to Answers: Need for Cognitive Closure and the Endorsement of Conspiracy Beliefs.” European Journal of Social Psychology 48 (2): 109–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marietta, Morgan, and Barker, David C.. 2019. One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meirick, Patrick C. 2013. “Motivated Misperception? Party, Education, Partisan News, and Belief in ‘Death Panels.’” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 90 (1): 39–57.Google Scholar
Mondak, Jeffrey J., and Anderson, Mary R.. 2004. “The Knowledge Gap: A Reexamination of Gender-Based Differences in Political Knowledge.” The Journal of Politics 66 (2): 492–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan. 2020. “Facts and Myths about Misperceptions.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34 (October): 220–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, Porter, Ethan, Reifler, Jason, and Wood, Thomas J.. 2020. “Taking Fact-Checks Literally but Not Seriously? The Effects of Journalistic Fact-Checking on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability.” Political Behavior 42 (3): 939–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pasek, Josh, Sood, Gaurav, and Krosnick, Jon A.. 2015. “Misinformed about the Affordable Care Act? Leveraging Certainty to Assess the Prevalence of Misperceptions.” Journal of Communication 65 (4): 660–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pennycook, Gordon, and Rand, David G.. 2019. “Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning.” Cognition 188 (July): 39–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pennycook, Gordon, McPhetres, Jonathon, Bago, Bence, and Rand, David G.. 2021. “Beliefs About COVID-19 in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Novel Test of Political Polarization and Motivated Reasoning.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 48 (5): 750–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Permut, Stephanie, Fisher, Matthew, and Oppenheimer, Daniel M.. 2019. “TaskMaster: A Tool for Determining When Subjects Are on Task.” Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 2 (2): 188–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, Erik, and Iyengar, Shanto. 2021. “Partisan Gaps in Political Information and Information-Seeking Behavior: Motivated Reasoning or Cheerleading.” American Journal of Political Science 65 (1): 133–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prior, Markus, Sood, Gaurav, and Khanna, Kabir. 2015. “You Cannot be Serious. The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10 (July): 489–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prislin, Radmila. 1996. “Attitude Stability and Attitude Strength: One Is Enough to Make It Stable.” European Journal of Social Psychology 26 (3): 447–77.3.0.CO;2-I>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roch, Sylvia G., Woehr, David J., Mishra, Vipanchi, and Kieszczynska, Urszula. 2012. “Rater Training Revisited: An Updated Meta-Analytic Review of Frame-of-Reference Training.” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 85 (2): 370–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schuman, Howard, and Presser, Stanley. 1981. Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys. San Diego: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Scotto, Thomas J., Reifler, Jason, Hudson, David, and vanHeerde-Hudson, Jennifer. 2017. “We Spend How Much? Misperceptions, Innumeracy, and Support for the Foreign Aid in the United States and Great Britain.” Journal of Experimental Political Science 4 (2): 119–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strack, Fritz, and Martin, Leonard L.. 1987. “Thinking, Judging, and Communicating: A Process Account of Context Effects in Attitudes Surveys.” In Social information Processing and Survey Methodology, eds. Hippler, Hans J., Schwarz, Norbert, and Sudman, Seymour, 123–48. New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sturgis, Patrick, Allum, Nick, and Smith, Patten. 2008. “An Experiment on the Measurement of Political Knowledge in Surveys.” Public Opinion Quarterly 72 (1): 90–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, Robbie M., and Douglas, Karen M.. 2020. “Agreeing to Disagree: Reports of the Popularity of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Are Greatly Exaggerated.” Psychological Medicine 52 (2): 791–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tesler, Michael. 2018. “Elite Domination of Public Doubts about Climate Change (Not Evolution).” Political Communication 35 (2): 306–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorson, Emily A. 2015. “Identifying and Correcting Policy Misperceptions.” Unpublished Manuscript. George Washington University.Google Scholar
Tourangeau, Robert, Rips, Lance J., and Rasinski, Kenneth. 2000. The Psychology of Survey Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trautmann, Stefan T., and van de Kuilen, Gijs. 2015. “Belief Elicitation: A Horse Race among Truth Serums.” The Economic Journal 125 (589): 2116–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weeks, Brian E. 2018. “Media and Political Misperceptions.” In Misinformation and Mass Audiences, eds. Southwell, Brian G., Thorson, Emily A., and Sheble, Laura, 140–56. Austin: University of Texas Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiley, David E., and Wiley, James A.. 1970. “The Estimation of Measurement Error in Panel.” American Sociological Review 35 (1): 112–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, Vanessa. 2019. “Public Ignorance or Elitist Jargon? Reconsidering Americans’ Overestimates of Government Waste and Foreign Aid.” American Politics Research 47 (1): 152–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woehr, David J. 1994. “Understanding Frame-of-Reference Training: The Impact of Training on the Recall of Performance Information.” Journal of Applied Psychology 79 (4): 525–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. 2012. Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach. Boston, MA: Cengage.Google Scholar
Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Graham Dataset

Dataset https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SBXFXC
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Graham supplementary material

Graham supplementary material
Download Graham supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 193.7 KB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.