Examining, Correcting, and Failing to Correct Politically Biased Judgments and Memories in Real-World Contexts

This dissertation brings together three projects at the intersection of politics, bias, memory, and decision making. The five studies in total explore how people come to political judgments, when they might be biased in those judgments, how their memory might be affected, and what real-world consequences this can have.The first chapter describes a longitudinal study conducted over the course of the 2016 presidential election. The study collected data from 602 U.S. citizens on Amazon Mechanical Turk during the presidential primaries in May 2016, with questions focused on voters’ feelings towards, and preferences for, the candidates seeking each major party’s nomination. A follow-up survey was sent to participants again in October 2016 just before the general election to see how their attitudes changed and what they remembered about their past preferences. Participants were re-surveyed once more in January 2017 just before the inauguration to look at their reactions to the election, feelings towards the former candidates, and memory of past attitudes. Across a variety of questions, people’s memory for their past attitudes was strongly influenced by their present attitudes; more specifically, those who had changed their opinion of a candidate remembered their past attitude as being more in line with their current feeling than it actually was. This was especially strong among people who were more confident in their memory and their own rationality. I also investigated the presence of false memory, and found high rates of participants remembering news events that didn’t happen and misremembering what candidate they had supported.In the second chapter, three studies are presented in the domain of political polling, looking at how the placement and order of questions can create contexts that appear to increase or decrease political polarization. In all three studies, each with over 800 people, participants had to make judgments about similar accusations against two politicians, one Democrat and one Republican, with each rating on a separate page. On the first judgment, partisans provided strongly disparate ratings, with both Democrats and Republicans giving low credibility to the accusations against their in-group politicians and high credibility to the accusations against the out-group. On participants’ second ratings, however, the groups were much closer together. This is because, after making their first rating, participants’ second rating was more in line with their judgment of the first, similar accusation. In one study (but not others), this consistency was increased by first having participants commit to relevant, general principles about whether people should believe this type of accusation in general.Finally, Chapter 3 takes a look at the growing problem of politically-oriented “fake news,” or completely false stories or headlines. In the real world, such fake news stories are designed to appeal to specific groups of people and be shared widely within these groups. Previous studies found that adding a warning tag to false headlines has minimal effect in reducing belief in these falsehoods. The chapter starts with a secondary analysis of prior data showing a partisan congruency effect, where warnings may help reduce belief in news that goes against a person’s political orientation, but shows less effect when the news supports a person’s political orientation. Following up on that, I conducted a study with over 400 online participants, testing a modified warning that comes before people read false headlines and comparing it to warnings presented at the same time as or after the headline. Participants were shown a series of news items, with the false ones labeled as such with one of the three warning types, and then asked two weeks later how true they thought each headline was. While the before-headline warning was initially very effective, and showed some stronger effects than the other warnings, the follow-up survey two weeks later showed both high levels of belief in the articles and a partisan congruency effect where people were more likely to believe the news that fit with their political orientation, even when they had known just two weeks ago it was false.Across these three chapters, I look at the effects of politics, bias, and motivation on our memory and judgment in real-world political contexts. The effects of political allegiance are apparent not only on our opinions of politicians, but also on our memories of ourselves and the world around us. These effects are incredibly strong, and far too often we are unaware of them. Some manipulations were effective at reducing differences between ingroup and outgroup judgments, while others were not. These studies add to our understanding of the role of political allegiances on our judgments and memories by identifying some sources of these effects, showing how they play out in real-world contexts, and testing solutions that are more and less likely to show long-term impact in these divisive contexts

Perceived strength of forensic scientists’ reporting statements about source conclusions

Three studies investigated lay people’s perceptions of the relative strength of various conclusions that a forensic scientist might present about whether two items (fingerprints, biological samples) have a common source. Lay participants made a series of judgments about which of two conclusions seemed stronger for proving the items had a common source. The data were fitted to Thurstone–Mosteller paired comparison models to obtain rank-ordered lists of the various statements and an indication of the perceived differences among them. The results reveal the perceived strength of several types of statements, relative to one another, including verbal statements regarding strength of support (e.g. ‘extremely strong support for same source’), source probability statements (e.g. ‘highly probable same source’), random match probabilities (e.g. RMP = 1 in 100 000), likelihood ratios, and categorical statements (e.g. ‘identification’). These comparisons in turn provide insight into whether particular statements about the strength of forensic evidence convey the intended meaning and will be interpreted in a manner that is justifiable and appropriate

Fool me twice: How effective is debriefing in false memory studies?

Deception is often necessary in false memory studies, especially when the study aims to explore the effect of misinformation on memory. At the end of the study, participants are debriefed, but does this eliminate the influence of misinformation? In the current study, we followed up 630 participants six months after they participated in a study in which they were exposed to fabricated political news stories. We compared the memories of these â continuing participantsâ for both novel and previously seen news stories to the memories of 474 newly recruited participants. Relative to new recruits, continuing participants were less likely to report a false memory for a story that they had been previously exposed to, and they were also less likely to report a false memory for a novel fake news story. Continuing participants were more likely to report a memory for previously seen true events than novel true events. Both groups of participants reported enjoying the experience and feeling confident that they understood which stories were fabricated. Importantly, this study did not find any negative long-term effects of participating in our false memory experiment, and even exhibited some positive effects

False memories for fake news during Ireland's abortion referendum

The current study examined false memories in the week preceding the 2018 Irish abortion referendum. Participants (N = 3,140) viewed six news stories concerning campaign events—two fabricated and four authentic. Almost half of the sample reported a false memory for at least one fabricated event, with more than one third of participants reporting a specific memory of the event. “Yes” voters (those in favor of legalizing abortion) were more likely than “no” voters to “remember” a fabricated scandal regarding the campaign to vote “no,” and “no” voters were more likely than “yes” voters to “remember” a fabricated scandal regarding the campaign to vote “yes.” This difference was particularly strong for voters of low cognitive ability. A subsequent warning about possible misinformation slightly reduced rates of false memories but did not eliminate these effects. This study suggests that voters in a real-world political campaign are most susceptible to forming false memories for fake news that aligns with their beliefs, in particular if they have low cognitive ability

The pipeline project:Pre-publication independent replications of a single laboratory's research pipeline

This crowdsourced project introduces a collaborative approach to improving the reproducibility of scientific research, in which findings are replicated in qualified independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. Our goal is to establish a non-adversarial replication process with highly informative final results. To illustrate the Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) approach, 25 research groups conducted replications of all ten moral judgment effects which the last author and his collaborators had "in the pipeline" as of August 2014. Six findings replicated according to all replication criteria, one finding replicated but with a significantly smaller effect size than the original, one finding replicated consistently in the original culture but not outside of it, and two findings failed to find support. In total, 40% of the original findings failed at least one major replication criterion. Potential ways to implement and incentivize pre-publication independent replication on a large scale are discussed. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.</p

Data from a pre-publication independent replication initiative examining ten moral judgement effects

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory's research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science

The pipeline project: Pre-publication independent replications of a single laboratory's research pipeline

This crowdsourced project introduces a collaborative approach to improving the reproducibility of scientific research, in which findings are replicated in qualified independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. Our goal is to establish a non-adversarial replication process with highly informative final results. To illustrate the Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) approach, 25 research groups conducted replications of all ten moral judgment effects which the last author and his collaborators had “in the pipeline” as of August 2014. Six findings replicated according to all replication criteria, one finding replicated but with a significantly smaller effect size than the original, one finding replicated consistently in the original culture but not outside of it, and two findings failed to find support. In total, 40% of the original findings failed at least one major replication criterion. Potential ways to implement and incentivize pre-publication independent replication on a large scale are discussed

Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence

Data from a pre-publication independent replication initiative examining ten moral judgement effects

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory's research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex

The pipeline project: Pre-publication independent replications of a single laboratory's research pipeline

© 2015 The Authors This crowdsourced project introduces a collaborative approach to improving the reproducibility of scientific research, in which findings are replicated in qualified independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. Our goal is to establish a non-adversarial replication process with highly informative final results. To illustrate the Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) approach, 25 research groups conducted replications of all ten moral judgment effects which the last author and his collaborators had âin the pipelineâ as of August 2014. Six findings replicated according to all replication criteria, one finding replicated but with a significantly smaller effect size than the original, one finding replicated consistently in the original culture but not outside of it, and two findings failed to find support. In total, 40% of the original findings failed at least one major replication criterion. Potential ways to implement and incentivize pre-publication independent replication on a large scale are discussed.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex