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Accuracy and Social Motivations Shape Judgements of (Mis)Information

Liberals and conservatives are divided in their judgements about the accuracy of true and false news. Yet it is unclear whether this partisan divide reflects genuine differences in knowledge, or whether it can be overcome if people are motivated to be accurate. Across three experiments (n = 2,381), we motivated participants to be accurate by giving them a small financial incentive to provide correct responses about the veracity of news headlines. This incentive improved accuracy and reduced partisan bias in belief in news headlines – especially for conservative participants. Increasing social motivations, however, decreased accuracy. Replicating prior work, conservatives were substantially less accurate than liberals at discerning true from false headlines. Yet, this gap between liberals and conservatives closed by 60% when conservatives were motivated to be accurate. Altogether, these findings suggest that many instances of belief in (mis)information may reflect a lack of motivation to be accurate instead of a simple lack of knowledge.