Narratives and opinion polarization: a survey experiment

Autor: Armenak Antinyan, Thomas Bassetti, Luca Corazzini, Filippo Pavesi
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Zdroj: Scientific Reports, Vol 14, Iss 1, Pp 1-16 (2024)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2045-2322
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-70012-6
Popis: Abstract We explore the impact of narratives on beliefs and policy opinions through a survey experiment that exposes US subjects to two media-based explanations of the causes of COVID-19. The Lab Narrative ascribes the pandemic to human error and scientific misconduct in a Chinese lab, and the Nature Narrative describes the natural causes of the virus. First, we find that both narratives influence individual beliefs about COVID-19 origins. More precisely, individual beliefs tend to be swayed in the direction of the version of the facts to which one is more exposed generating a potential source of polarization by exposure. Second, only the Nature Narrative unidirectionally affects policy opinions by increasing people’s preferences toward climate protection and trust in science, therefore representing a channel for one-sided polarization by exposure. Finally, we also explore the existence of heterogeneous effects of our narratives, finding that the Lab Narrative leads to opinion polarization between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states on climate change and foreign trade. This indicates the existence of an additional channel that can lead policy opinions to diverge, which we denote polarization by social context.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals
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