Argument evaluation and production in the correction of political innumeracy

Abstract

AbstractThe public is largely innumerate, making systematic mistakes in estimating some politically relevant facts, such as the share of foreign-born citizens. In two-step or multistep flow models, such mistakes could be corrected if better-informed citizens were able to convince their peers, in particular by using good arguments citing reliable sources. In six experiments, we find two issues that dampen the potential power of this two-step flow process. First, even though participants were more convinced by good than by poor arguments, many did not change their minds, even when confronted with good arguments. Second, participants are not inclined to spontaneously generate arguments that cite reliable sources, even when they have just been influenced by such arguments. Both issues should put a significant brake in the spread of political numeracy through the two-step flow process, in particular in non-dialogic contexts.Keywords: Political numeracytwo-step flowargument evaluationargument productionargument transmission AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) under grants ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL. We thank John Sides for providing constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper.Disclosure statementThe authors report there are no competing interests to declare.Notes1 All Experiments were conducted between Fall 2016 and Summer 2017.2 The distribution is thus far from being normal. However, since t-tests are very robust against non-normality, we have relied on them rather than on Wilcoxon tests (Rasch & Guiard, Citation2004). The same analyses using Wilcoxon signed-rank test can be found in the ESM.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) under grants ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL.