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Citizens as Complicits: Distrust in Politicians and Biased Social Dissemination of Political Information
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2020
Abstract
Widespread distrust in politicians is often attributed to the way elites portray politics to citizens: the media, competing candidates, and foreign governments are largely considered responsible for portraying politicians as self-interested actors pursuing personal electoral and economic interests. This article turns to the mass level and considers the active role of citizens in disseminating such information. We build on psychological research on human cooperation, holding that people exhibit an interpersonal transmission bias in favor of information on the self-interested, antisocial behavior of others to maintain group cooperation. We posit that this transmission bias extends to politics, causing citizens to disproportionally disseminate information on self-interested politicians through interpersonal communication and, in turn, contributes to distrust in politicians and policy disapproval. We support these predictions using novel experimental studies, allowing us to observe transmission rates and opinion effects in actual communication chains. The findings have implications for understanding and accommodating political distrust.
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- Research Article
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- © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association
Footnotes
The authors want to thank the following people for helpful comments and advice: Kim S½nderskov, Claes de Vreese, Rasmus Tue Pedersen, Lasse Laustsen, Peter DeScioli, Regula Hðnggli, Hugo Mercier, members of the section on Political Behavior and Institutions at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, participants at the New Ideas in Evolution and Social Cognition seminar, DÕpartement d’Õtudes cognitives, ècole Normale SupÕrieure, and participants at the Behaviour Seminar, Paris School of Economics. We also want to thank Ingo Rohlfing and three anonymous reviewers. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/19FLXV.
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