The Real Story About Fake News Is Partisanship - The New York Times - 0 views
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Partisan bias now operates more like racism than mere political disagreement, academic research on the subject shows
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Americans’ deep bias against the political party they oppose is so strong that it acts as a kind of partisan prism for facts, refracting a different reality to Republicans than to Democrats.
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the repercussions go far beyond stories shared on Facebook and Reddit, affecting Americans’ faith in government — and the government’s ability to function.
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until a few decades ago, people’s feelings about their party and the opposing party were not too different. But starting in the 1980s, Americans began to report increasingly negative opinions of their opposing party.
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Not only did party identity turn out to affect people’s behavior and decision making broadly, even on apolitical subjects, but according to their data it also had more influence on the way Americans behaved than race did.
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Partisanship, for a long period of time, wasn’t viewed as part of who we are,” he said. “It wasn’t core to our identity. It was just an ancillary trait. But in the modern era we view party identity as something akin to gender, ethnicity or race — the core traits that we use to describe ourselves to others.”
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That has made the personal political. “Politics has become so important that people select relationships on that basis,”
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And it has become more rare for children to have a different party affiliation from their parents. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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it has also made the political personal. Today, political parties are no longer just the people who are supposed to govern the way you want. They are a team to support, and a tribe to feel a part of
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And the public’s view of politics is becoming more and more zero-sum: It’s about helping their team win, and making sure the other team loses.
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Partisan tribalism makes people more inclined to seek out and believe stories that justify their pre-existing partisan biases, whether or not they are true.
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“You want to show that you’re a good member of your tribe,” Mr. Westwood said. “You want to show others that Republicans are bad or Democrats are bad, and your tribe is good. Social media provides a unique opportunity to publicly declare to the world what your beliefs are
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Partisan bias fuels fake news because people of all partisan stripes are generally quite bad at figuring out what news stories to believe. Instead, they use trust as a shortcut. Rather than evaluate a story directly, people look to see if someone credible believes it, and rely on that person’s judgment to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.
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Sharing those stories on social media is a way to show public support for one’s partisan team — roughly the equivalent of painting your face with team colors on game day.
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They found that participants gave more money if they were told the other player supported the same political party as they did.
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Partisanship’s influence on trust means that when there is a partisan divide among experts, Mr. Sides said, “you get people believing wildly different sets of facts.”
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the bigger concern is that the natural consequence of this growing national divide will be a feedback loop in which the public’s bias encourages extremism among politicians, undermining public faith in government institutions and their ability to function.
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“This is an incentive for Republicans and Democrats in Congress to behave in a hyperpartisan manner in order to excite their base.”
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That feeds partisan bias among the public by reinforcing the idea that the opposition is made up of bad or dangerous people, which then creates more demand for political extremism.
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The result is an environment in which compromise and collaboration with the opposing party are seen as signs of weakness, and of being a bad member of the tribe.
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“It’s a vicious cycle,” Mr. Iyengar said. “All of this is going to make policy-making and fact-finding more problematic.”
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Now, “you have quite a few people who are willing to call into question an institution for centuries that has been sacrosanct,”
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. “The consequences of that are insane,” he said, “and potentially devastating to the norms of democ
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“I don’t think things are going to get better in the short term; I don’t think they’re going to get better in the long term. I think this is the new normal.”