Most See Their Own Party’s Falsehoods As More Acceptable

This article by Jeff Galak, is published by Carnergie University. Here is an excerpt:

Society recognizes that many politicians lie. In five new studies, researchers examined how conservative and liberal Americans responded to media reports of politicians’ falsehoods. Even accounting for partisan biases in how much people dismissed the reports as fake news and assumed the lies were unintentional, the studies consistently identified partisan evaluations in how much these falsehoods were considered justifiable. The researchers’ work—which also touches on issues of trustworthiness and morality more generally—has implications for understanding the current hyperpolarized U.S. political climate.

The studies, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the University of California, Berkeley, appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Our study suggests that who tells a falsehood, what the falsehood is about, and who is listening all help predict how people explain and evaluate politicians who do not speak the truth,” explains Jeff Galak, Associate Professor of Marketing at CMU’s Tepper School of Business, who led the study. “In so doing, the study emphasizes that the moral acceptability of bearing false witness really depends on the extent to which such falsehoods are used in support of or against the explicit aims of one’s political group.

Read the full article here.