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Until fairly recently, President Donald Trump’s MAGA fold mostly united around a certain set of beliefs. But researchers have now confirmed that at least one of their founding principles is based on the complete absence of any hint of fact in their lives or in their circle.
“Psychology researchers Christopher Stockus, now at Marietta College, and Ethan Zell of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro … designed a project to measure whether an objective gap in factual knowledge exists between [left-leaning and right-leaning] political groups,” reports PsyPost. “The researchers wanted to investigate if this knowledge gap might explain the differences in how each group views the necessity of environmental policies.
Plenty of scientists have tested specific partisan misconceptions or beliefs in conspiracy theories, but comprehensive tests comparing overall knowledge across political groups are relatively rare. But Stockus and Zell established a systematic method to evaluate general knowledge and track accuracy and confidence, and then rounded up 217 American adults who identified strongly as either Democrats or Republicans.
The first study revealed that Democrats had a “notably higher hit rate” for being correct and a lower rate of “confidently” but wrongly marking a false statement as true. So, left-leaning participants were better at both recognizing real facts and rejecting false ones.
This left right-leaning participants being more frequently wrong and also more confident about the thing they were wrong on. In short: Lots of confidence, low facts.
When the pair took their investigation to the U.K. they discovered a similar dynamic between survey respondents self-identifying as the more left-leaning Labour Party and the right-leaning Conservative Party. The British participants completed the exact same quizzes and surveys as the American cohort, and with similar results.
“Overall, Labour supporters showed a higher hit rate for factual statements than Conservative supporters,” they report.
Participants in both national surveys skewed younger, more educated, and whiter than the general population. But the extent of their skepticism about the severity of human-induced planetary warming, in this one study, remained firmly planted in which side of the political spectrum they leaned.