Do Citizens Care if Politicians Lie? Fact-checking, Partisan Bias and Trust in Politicians and Media Sources during the US Presidential Election Campaign of 2016

Claims of a lack of honesty in political campaigns are frequent in the public debate. Political fact-checks specifically aim at detecting political falsehoods. The few existing studies about the effects of fact checks focus on their potential to correct misinformation. However, exposing untruthful claims also reveals important information about the respective politician because it is likely to be perceived as deliberate dishonesty. Honesty is traditionally considered a core driver of trustworthiness perceptions. Thus, disclosed dishonesty is expected to decrease perceived trustworthiness of politicians. Yet do these assumptions hold in the context of political fact-checking? We study this question via experiments during the US election 2016 using a 2(candidate favorability:Y/N) by 2(negative fact-check:Y/N) design. Drawing on research on corrective information we assume that exposure to a negative fact check leads to lower trustworthiness perceptions, yet this is more pronounced for the opposing candidate than for the preferred candidate. Further, we expect individuals that encounter negative fact-checks about their preferred candidate to counter argue the information by lowering their perceived trustworthiness of the fact-check outlet.