Published Oct. 10 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the study finds that the public at large tends to put partisanship over truth when consuming news.
This holds true across the political spectrum, education levels, and reasoning ability.
“We saw an effect of people being more influenced by political alignment than truth,” said Michael Schwalbe, lead author and postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
“We saw it on both political sides and even among people who scored well on a reasoning test.
For example, in one measure of bias, the researchers assessed people’s beliefs about their political side’s objectivity as compared to the other side.

News consumers are more influenced by political alignment than by truth, new study shows