Can Mini-Publics Correct Misinformation? The Effects of Source Cues, Populist Attitudes, and Trust in Experts

There is now considerable scholarly interest in the causes of belief in political misinformation as well as the capacity of various strategies, such as fact-checking, to correct this misinformation. Since corrections often originate with institutions associated with elites and experts, such as universities or newspapers, we hypothesize that individuals with populist attitudes or high levels of distrust in expertise will be more likely to reject corrections. Using a survey experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n=836), we find evidence to support this hypothesis. Contrary to recent research, we find a backfire effect where the correction actually reinforces misperceptions for respondents with populist attitudes or high levels of distrust in experts. Observational research indicates that deliberative mini-publics – small groups of citizens selected, often at random, from the population at large to participate in a facilitated deliberation process – can persuade citizens with populist attitudes because they are made up of ‘ordinary’ citizens. We find that deliberative mini-publics can dampen the propensity of populists to resist corrections, but they don’t seem to be generally any more persuasive than corrections from more traditional sources for citizens with less populist attitudes.