Self-Reported Exposure and Beliefs About Misinformation Across a U.S. Presidential Election Cycle: Expressive Responding and Motivated Reasoning

Abstract

There is an on-going debate about the degree to which Americans’ self-reported beliefs in falsehoods are expressive, serving to increase respondents’ standing with their political in-group and to sway others, or sincere. Furthermore, there has been little consideration of whether the meaning of self-reported beliefs might change over time and whether liberals and conservatives differ in their propensity to engage in expressive responding. We contribute to this debate using a novel approach that compares self-reported exposure and belief about researcher-created “decoy” falsehoods that are critical of the political in-group to matching items that are critical of the out-group over an eight-wave panel study conducted during and after the 2020 election season. We find that exposure and beliefs in decoy falsehoods targeting the in-group and out-group tend to be similar, suggesting that expressive responding is relatively rare. There is, however, a modest increase in partisan bias in self-reported exposure and belief in these decoys associated with temporal proximity to the U.S. presidential election. We find little evidence of a difference between Republicans and Democrats self-reported belief in decoy falsehoods.