It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, August 02, 2020
Steve Mnuchin whines about people being ‘overpaid’ on unemployment: ‘There’s no question’
THE DIALECTIC SAYS, PEOPLE ARE PAID TO LITTLE TO WORK, AND $600 PER WEEK IS $15 PER HOUR. WHICH IS WHAT THE MINIMUM WAGE SHOULD BE!
SO IF THEY DON'T GO TO WORK CAPITALISM SAYS PAY THEM MORE AND GIVE THEM BENEFITS TO GET THEM BACK TO WORK
MILLIONAIRES WHINE ABOUT FOLKS GETTING PAID TOO MUCH FOR NOT WORKING. WHICH IS WHAT THEY DO.
Published August 2, 2020 By David Edwards Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Sunday complained that many people who receive unemployment benefits during the pandemic have been “overpaid.”
During an interview with ABC news, Mnuchin said that Republicans are pushing back against the $600 weekly federal unemployment benefit because it is more than many people received from their jobs.
“Unemployment is supposed to be wage replacement,” the Treasury secretary told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. “So it should be tied to some percentage of wages.”
“We want to fix the issue where in some cases people are overpaid,” he continued. “And we want to make sure there’s the right incentives.”
“Do you do think it’s a disincentive to find a job if you have that extra $600?” Raddatz asked.
“There’s no question,” Mnuchin replied. “In certain cases, where we’re paying people more to stay home than to work, that’s created issues in the entire economy.”
Raddatz interrupted by pointing out a Yale study which found that there is no evidence that the $600 weekly payment is a disincentive to return to work.
“I went to Yale,” Mnuchin replied. “There are certain things, I don’t always agree.”
WATCH: New Lincoln Project ad flattens Trump for ‘violent abuse’ of moms
A new ad from the Never-Trumper group The Lincoln Project hammers Donald Trump for using heavily-armored federal law enforcement officials to attack moms attending police brutality protests in Portland and elsewhere.
The ad, simply called “Moms,” juxtaposes videos of “… working moms. Stay at home moms … black, white, Latina, Asian, straight, gay moms,” being teargassed by federal officials to devastating effect.
The videos show the mothers standing arm-in-arm taking the blows of police and the clouds of gas, but they persevered, to protect the young protesters police attempted to attack.
It ends with, “Wait until he [Trump] sees what American moms do on November 3rd.”
‘You should have reported it’: James Clyburn scolds Fox News host over white supremacists inciting violence
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) on Sunday accused Fox News host Pete Hegseth of failing to report that white supremacists had attempted to incite violence during Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon and other places.
“As you know, over the last couple of months, we’ve seen riots in Portland,” Hegseth told Clyburn during an interview on Fox & Friends. “President Trump made it clear, we’re going to send federal agents, law enforcement officers there to protect federal property as necessary.”
The Fox News host went on to accuse Clyburn of comparing federal agents to “the Gestapo.”
“Why would you make such a comparison when what they’re doing is their job to protect federal property?” Hegseth asked.
“I don’t know if I ever compared what they’re doing to the Gestapo,” Clyburn objected.
“It’s right there in the transcript,” Hegseth said, referring to a CNN interview in which Clyburn said Trump is trying to “impose Gestapo activities in local communities.”
“Maybe I did,” Clyburn replied. “I am never one to think I can never misspeak. That is not to say what I feel. But what I do feel, what I’ve seen in Portland, reminds me very much of what I saw in Anniston, Alabama back in the ’60s, what I saw on the Edmund Pettus Bridge back in the ’60s, where state-sponsored and supported terrorism was visited upon people who were protesting peacefully.
Hegseth seemed outraged by the comparison.
“They’re burning Bibles in Portland instead of holding them on the bridge like the peaceful protesters did in the 1960s,” the Fox News host remarked.
“I don’t know anything about burning Bibles,” Clyburn said. “Burning a Bible doesn’t do anything about burning down a federal building. Maybe you all have seen something I don’t know. What federal building has been under threat?”
“With all due respect, Congressman, you may be watching other networks,” Hegseth charged. “It’s been fireworks, Molotov cocktails, explosions, attacks at officers night after night after night.”
“I do defend [the officers] as well,” Clyburn insisted. “But I don’t defend pretenders. We saw in Minneapolis a guy in black knocking out windows. When they arrested him, they found out he’s a white supremacist disguising himself. And that’s what’s going on all over.”
“Look, I was in these movies back in the ’60s,” he continued. “I walked right alongside John Lewis and everybody else. And I can tell you, we never rioted. But there was rioting going on. Burn, baby, burn was not us. Somebody else, insurgents came in. Pretenders came in, in order to subvert the movement.”
Clyburn added: “And that’s what’s going on here. Black Lives Matter will not ever, the people connected to that will not burn down any buildings. But the people who are trying to incite stuff, the pretenders — not protesters, but pretenders — will do anything.”
The South Carolina Democrat concluded by admonishing the Fox News host.
“You saw that on the camera yourselves and you should have reported it,” he said. “Other places did.”
Watch the video below from Fox News.
I DON'T AGREE WITH CONGRESSMAN CLYBURN OR OTHERS THAT TRY TO CLAIM
A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTI FED PROTESTS, EQUATING THE LATTER WITH SO CALLED VANDALISM, GRAFFITI AND BURNING
THERE HAS BEEN NO LOOTING. FIRES CAN BE STARTED BY ANYONE. INCLUDING COPS WHO STAND AROUND DOING NOTHING WAITING FOR THE FIRE TRUCKS
LOOK CLOSELY WHEN CLAIMS ARE MADE BUILDINGS ARE BURNING, WHEN IN FACT ITS GARBAGE BURNING IN DUMPSTERS OR SCRAP DUMPS AT BUILDING SITES. PORTLAND WAS A CASE IN FACT.
BLACK BLOC AND ANARCHISTS AS WELL AS ANTIFA ARE PROTESTING TRUMP'S COPS THEY COME OUT AT NIGHT. DAYTIME PROTESTS ARE DIFFERENT MORE TEACH IN'S AT NIGHT THE PROTESTS HAVE BEEN MASS ACTIONS. WITH MOMS, DADS AND VETS ALL DEFENDING THE PROTESTERS FROM THE FED COPS
EVEN AT NIGHT TIME THE PORTLAND PROTESTS HAVE BEEN MASS EVENTS
ALL RIOTS ARE POLICE RIOTS, ALL RIOTS ARE POLICE BRUTALITY AGAINST NON VIOLENT PROTESTERS.
Mask-wearing was a risk factor for COVID-related discrimination during the early stage of the pandemic, study finds
Asian Americans are more likely than other ethnic groups to have experienced an incident of COVID-related discrimination, which appears to be partially related to wearing face masks, according to new research published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine30273-7/fulltext). The study also found evidence that perceived discrimination was linked to greater mental distress during the early stages of the pandemic.
“Disease-associated discrimination is nothing new in the history of outbreaks of novel viruses,” said study author Ying Liu, a research scientist at the Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California.
“Lessons from past outbreaks (e.g., SARS, H1N1) has told us that such discrimination does not only compound the adverse effects of the public health crisis (e.g., the unnecessary mental health burden that we observed in the study), but also may hinder the disease control efforts (e.g., people experienced discriminatory acts may be fearful and thus less likely to seek for medical help when they are infected or think they are infected).”
“Both the CDC and WHO have called to prevent COVID-related discrimination since the very beginning of the pandemic. Therefore, ‘is it still happening’ and ‘what drives it’ are natural and important questions to answer,” Liu told PsyPost.
“Another personal reason is that since late January or February, I’ve heard friends complaining about discriminatory acts (e.g., against Asians, and those who lived in Seattle when Washington State first reported the outbreak). I wondered to what extent those incidents were just occasional or random events, or they were more prevalent and systematic.”
The researchers used online surveys to gather data from a nationally representative sample of 3,665 U.S. residents in March and April, during the early stage of the pandemic in the United States. The participants reported whether they had experienced discrimination due to people thinking they might have the coronavirus. Specifically, they were asked if they had been treated with less courtesy and respect than others; received poorer service at restaurants or stores; noticed people acting as if they were afraid of them; or whether they had been threatened or harassed.
The researchers found that the overall percentage of participants perceiving discrimination due to the coronavirus doubled from 4% in March to 10% in April. The percentages were higher among certain minority groups. About 11% of Asians and 9% of African Americans had experienced discrimination in March, compared to 4% of whites. This increased to 16% of Asians and 15% of African Americans in April, compared to 9% of whites.
Wearing face masks and being an immigrant were also found to be risk factors associated with coronavirus-related discrimination. The higher degree of discrimination experienced by Asians in March was partially explained by their immigration status and mask-wearing.
“Discrimination against people who are thought to have COVID-19, even if they weren’t actually infected, is a serious social and public health matter,” Liu said.
“Although the overall trend seems tilting down a bit, the racial/ethnic gap is very persistent with no indication it’s closing. Cumulatively, 1 in 3 of these minority groups have experienced at least one incident since March, relative to 1 in 5 of white people. We also found that people who wore face masks were more susceptible to discrimination, especially at earlier stages of the pandemic when mask-wearing was rarer.”
The researchers also found that experiences of discrimination were associated with increased mental distress.
“This kind of discrimination also has direct consequences on public health and current disease control. We observed that people with COVID-related discriminatory experiences showed more symptoms of anxiety and depression,” Liu told PsyPost.
“Furthermore, lessons from previous outbreaks such as SARS and H1N1 tell us mental distress and fears triggered by such social stigma could make affected people less likely to seek for help, for instance, when they are infected or suspect they are infected, because they could be more afraid of exposing themselves to COVID-related encounters, e.g., hospitals and testing sites. In other words, this discrimination could potentially undermine current disease control efforts.”
“To combat this kind of discrimination, public awareness is the first step. Combating racial bias is also critical. The sooner we stop thinking of people of color as being ‘others’ or part of a less than equal group, the sooner we can end this type of discrimination and blaming of who are responsible for the pandemic.”
The ongoing Understanding Coronavirus in America tracking survey has found evidence that “people of color are, in fact, the ones most harmed from pandemic,” Liu said.
“For the interested public (including policymakers and health care practitioners), we’d encourage everyone to visit our Understanding Coronavirus in America Study website, at which we provide a dashboard updated daily on the trends, on this topic and beyond.TrendMD v2.4.8
GHOST IN THE MACHINE VR study shows how easy it is to get people to incorrectly think they’re in the presence of another being
Humans have a tendency to incorrectly detect another person or creature in their environment, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as hypersensitive agency detection. New research utilized virtual reality technology to examine whether agency detection was associated with belief in the supernatural.
The study suggests that people with a stronger belief in supernatural agents are not more likely to falsely perceive other beings. This type of false perception, however, might be associated with certain superstitions.
“I became interested in this topic through a combination of me-search and research,” said researcher Adam E. Tratner, a doctor of psychology (PhD) affiliated with Oakland University.
“Throughout my life I have met many people who believe in supernatural agents (e.g., ghosts, spirits, bigfoot, etc) and claim to have had direct encounters with them. Despite the lack of evidence for the existence of the supernatural, these beliefs and experiences are so common across human societies that I began to wonder if there were reasonable scientific explanations for them.”
“Fast forward to graduate school and I was introduced to scholarly work that attempted to address this from a psychological standpoint, so I decided to conduct some research that investigated whether cognitive and perceptual processes are related to such beliefs,” Tratner explained.
For their study, Tratner and his colleagues first had 107 college students complete a survey regarding their beliefs in paranormal and supernatural phenomena. The students were then fitted with an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and played an exploration-themed video game for approximately 30 minutes.
The students were asked to explore a virtual forest and click the right mouse button whenever they believed there was someone or something else in the virtual environment. However, no other people or creatures were actually present.
Even though the participants were alone the entire time, the researchers found that 90% of them reported perceiving the presence of another being in the environment at least once. The participants falsely reported another being in their virtual environment about 13 times on average.
“We demonstrated that it’s very easy to get people to think that they are ‘seeing things’ around them in a virtual reality environment,” Tratner told PsyPost.
“Surprisingly, we found that the tendency to falsely perceive agents in the environment was unrelated to actual beliefs in supernatural agents (e.g., ghosts, bigfoot, etc), but was related instead to beliefs in Feng Shui. This was unexpected because Feng Shui is more similar to superstition, whereas we hypothesized that individuals who are more likely to falsely perceive agents would have stronger beliefs in supernatural agents.”
“One possibility for this finding is that individuals who believe in Feng Shui may be more prone to faulty causal reasoning, which may lead them to think that the things they perceive in the virtual reality environment (e.g., sounds, movement) are being caused by an agent in the environment,” Tratner said.
Agency detection doesn’t appear to be related to individual differences in supernatural beliefs. But the general tendency to falsely perceive other beings in one’s environment still may have played a role in facilitating belief in the supernatural over the course of human history.
The researchers hope future research can address the current study’s methodological limitations and provide more information on the topic.
“I interpret the findings of this study with caution because there are different issues surrounding different aspects of the study that could have affected the results. This study used a relatively small convenience sample of undergraduate students, which means that the findings could be a fluke,” Tratner said.
“There are also issues with the study’s procedures. For instance, we explicitly told participants to be on the lookout for agents in the environment, which may have prompted them to mistakenly perceive agents more than they would have if we did not tell them anything. Also, we only assessed their agency detection in one virtual environment, which was admittedly spooky, ominous, and filled with ambiguous stimuli.”
“The study would have really benefited from recruiting a larger, more representative sample, and using multiple virtual reality environments in order to compare the differences in agency detection across different environments,” Tratner added.
A recent study published in Chronic Stress found support for a psychedelic treatment not yet approved in the United States. US Special Operations Forces (SOF) Veterans treated with ibogaine and 5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) showed large reductions in symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety.
Special Operations Forces (SOF) are members of the military who have been singled out for their superior “physical and psychological resilience.” Still, they are typically exposed to more extreme conditions and show psychiatric impairment similar to that of conventional forces veterans.
“Although SOF Veterans exhibit PTSD symptoms at rates comparable to conventional forces Veterans,” study authors Alan K. Davis and associates say, “they may be more reluctant to seek mental health treatment. There is growing concern of a mental health crisis and an alarming increase in the incidence of suicides in SOF members highlighting limited effective treatment methods for this unique population.”
Davis and his team conducted a study among 51 US SOF veterans who received psychedelic treatment at a clinical program in Mexico between 2017 and 2019. Over the 3-day treatment, participants were given three to five doses of 5-MeO-DMT (a psychedelic tryptamine) and a single dose of Ibogaine (a psychoactive indole alkaloid).
In 2019, the 51 veterans completed a retrospective survey that asked them to rate various aspects of their mental health one month before the treatment and one month after. The assessments included symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, and suicidal tendencies. The surveys also assessed cognitive functioning, by asking subjects to report times they had felt “confused or had difficulties with reaction time, reasoning, memory, attention and concentration.”
The results overwhelmingly supported the treatment, uncovering strong decreases in reported symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety following the program. There was also a substantial drop in reports of suicidal ideation and cognitive impairment, and an increase in reported psychological flexibility. In fact, participant reports of post-treatment symptoms no longer met the cut-offs for clinical diagnoses.
Moreover, when asked to evaluate the program, the vast majority (80%) of participants were “either very (28%) or completely (53%) satisfied with the program.” The majority even reported that the program was “one of the top five most personally meaningful (84%), spiritually significant (88%), psychologically insightful (86%), and psychologically challenging (69%) experiences of their entire lives.”
Davis and his team explain how the two psychedelic drugs may have alleviated veterans’ psychiatric symptoms. 5-MeO-DMT, they say, “demonstrates neuroprotective, regenerative, and anti-inflammatory properties” which may be effective in treating the causes of cognitive impairment and PTSD. Ibogaine may also alleviate symptoms of PTSD, by facilitating “the evocation and reprocessing of traumatic memories and occasions therapeutic and meaningful visions of spiritual and autobiographical content.”
The study has significant limitations including recall bias, lack of clinical assessments, and an uncontrolled design which did not allow for a placebo. However, the compelling results lead researchers to call for future controlled studies to verify the effectiveness of ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT in treating veterans with psychological difficulties.
A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has uncovered genital responses in men that are consistent with a bisexual orientation. The research is the most “extensive assessment of bisexual men’s arousal patterns to date,” according to its authors.
“There has long been a controversy whether men who identify as bisexual are actually bisexual. The bisexual men and many others believe that they are. However, some others — including some scientists and lay persons — have doubted this,” said study author J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
“The latter believe that men who identify as bisexual are actually either heterosexual or homosexual, and that their claim to be bisexual is based on self-misunderstanding, perhaps due to social pressure not to admit exclusive homosexuality.”
“For reasons I won’t address here (I’d have to speculate), female bisexuality has not elicited nearly as much skepticism as male bisexuality,” Bailey added.
For their study, the researchers combined data from eight previous studies that included objective measures of genital response in men who also reported their Kinsey scores — a measure of self-reported sexual orientation. The data allowed Bailey and his colleagues to examine the sexual orientation of 606 men, who were around 29 years of age on average.
In the studies, the men reported their sexual orientation on the Kinsey scale and viewed erotic video clips while a device measured changes in the circumference of the penis.
The researchers found that 178 participants self-identified as exclusively heterosexual, 102 identified as mostly heterosexual, 46 as bisexual leaning heterosexual, 34 as bisexual, 37 as bisexual leaning homosexual, 70 as mostly homosexual, and 139 as exclusively homosexual.
Importantly, men who identified as bisexual displayed genital responses to female and male stimuli that were consistent with their self-reported orientation. Men in the middle of the Kinsey spectrum showed smaller differences in genital arousal to male versus female erotic stimuli, compared with exclusively heterosexual and homosexual men.
“Men who identify as bisexual tend actually to be more sexually aroused by both sexes compared with heterosexual and homosexual men. The idea that ‘all bisexual men are lying’ is false,” Bailey told PsyPost.
“However, even bisexual men tend not to be equally aroused by both male and female erotic stimuli. They still tend to show preferences, just smaller ones than heterosexual and homosexual men show.”
There are still some men who identify as bisexual who do not have a bisexual orientation, such as so-called “transitional bisexuals,” Bailey said.
“Skepticism does not only reflect prejudice. Many men who identify as homosexual (‘gay’) as adults go through a stage during their youth in which they identify as bisexual. Asked later, they usually say they were not actually bisexual during this time,” he explained.
“There are other reasons for identifying as bisexual that do not require bisexual orientation (by which I mean sexual arousal and attraction to both sexes to the degree that arousal/attraction to women exceed that of homosexual men and arousal/attraction to men exceed that of heterosexual men). This can include sexual experience with both sexes (which is not uncommon but does not require bisexual orientation) and atypical sexual interests (example: men attracted to she-males — natal males who have acquired breasts surgically while retaining their penises).”
The study, “Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men“, was authored by Jeremy Jabbour, Luke Holmes, David Sylva, Kevin J. Hsu, Theodore L. Semon, A. M. Rosenthal, Adam Safron, Erlend Slettevold, Tuesday M. Watts-Overall, Ritch C. Savin-Williams, John Syllah, Gerulf Rieger, and J. Michael Bailey.
Christian nationalism shapes Americans’ responses to the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to new research that analyzed data from 2,519 individuals.
The study, which can be viewed for free in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, indicates that those who embrace Christian nationalist ideology are more likely to flout measures intended to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Samuel Perry (@socofthesacred), an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma who co-authored the research along with Andrew L. Whitehead and Joshua B. Grubbs, spoke with PsyPost about the new findings.
That didn’t happen, obviously. All over the news we witnessed political leaders and media pundits on the far-right challenge expert recommendations about social distancing, wearing masks, sheltering in place, etc. And polls were also showing that Americans who were more religiously or politically conservative were following their leaders and reporting a lower likelihood of practicing recommended precautions, and in fact, almost flouting the expert recommendations on purpose.
But we thought this went deeper than just Republican-party loyalty or religious commitment per se. Our previous research on Christian nationalism shows us that oftentimes what’s driving these deep cultural divides is an ideology that, among other things, makes loyalty to one’s ethno-religious tribe the ultimate, but in this case also ties together four tendencies that combine to influence Americans’ COVID-related behaviors in the worst ways possible:
1. Christian nationalism by definition includes the idea that God has a special place in his heart for America, his New Israel. That implies a sort of cosmic preservation that’s expected by those who espouse Christian nationalist views. And in this mindset, if God allows COVID-19 to infect large numbers of Americans, it’s because of our moral and religious waywardness, not because of our failure to follow social distancing recommendations. So in the minds of Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism, the solution to COVID-19 is moral (and ethnic) purity, not masks. 2. As we’ve shown elsewhere, Christian nationalism is powerfully associated with science skepticism. Americans who score higher on Christian nationalism see science and scientists as an epistemological threat, challenging their moral authority in the public sphere. This would make adults who were higher on Christian nationalism more likely to challenge the recommendations of experts. 3. Research has shown that Americans who are more religiously conservative are more likely to feel targeted by the media and distrust most mainstream sources. While we haven’t directly connected Christian nationalism to media distrust in a peer-reviewed study yet, we felt it was pretty clear that if scientists and health experts are conveying their recommendations through mainstream media sources, their advice was more likely to be rejected by Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalist ideology. 4. Christian nationalism binds Americans to Trump. He’s the guy who sticks up for the values of “Americans like us,” and so Trump’s resistance to mask-wearing and skepticism toward experts was going to bring Christian nationalist Americans with him.
What should the average person take away from your study?
We used nationally-representative panel data collected during May of 2020, so right in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked a series of questions about how often someone engaged in various activities within the 2 previous weeks. These included precautionary behaviors like washing one’s hands more often than normal, wearing masks, avoiding touching one’s face, and using hand sanitizer more than normal. We also included risky or incautious behaviors like attending gatherings with 10+ people, going to a worship service, shopping for non-essential items, and so on.
We used our standard 6-item Christian nationalism scale that we’ve used in over a dozen previous studies thus far, and we included that in models predicting these behaviors along with controls for sociodemographic, religious, and political characteristics.
As we anticipated, adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was the leading predictor that Americans engaged in risky or incautious behaviors more often within the 2 previous weeks, and it was the second leading predictor that Americans avoided engaging in precautionary behaviors, like wearing masks or washing hands.
A little more surprising, we found that Americans who are more religious (attend service more often, pray more often, feel religion is more important) seemed to engage in precautionary behaviors more frequently. In fact, once we accounted for Christian nationalist ideology in our models, being more religious was the leading predictor that someone frequently engaged in precautionary behaviors.
This suggests to us that polls are getting it wrong if they show Americans who are “more religious” are behaving incautiously regarding COVID-19. It’s not “religiousness” per se that’s leading Americans to resist expert recommendations to curb the spread of disease. It’s Christian nationalist ideology and all that’s associated with it.
What questions still need to be addressed?
In terms of questions that still need to be addressed, we want to assess with future waves of panel data and other sources what the consequences were of this Christian nationalist ideology on actual COVID-19 outcomes. We’ve demonstrated that Americans who espouse Christian nationalist views were more likely to violate expert recommendations. But did they get infected more? Did COVID-19 blow up in regions with high concentrations of Christian nationalism? Did more people die? These are the questions we need to answer in order to tease out the practical consequences of this ideology.
People who visit FoxNews.com are no more or less likely to understand how the U.S. political system works compared to those who use other online media sources, according to a new study published in American Politics Research. But the study provides some initial evidence that using Fox’s website is associated with reduced knowledge about several politically-relevant topics, such as the state of the economy.
“I kept seeing people referencing it on social media but noticed that: 1) It was only about TV news when a lot of news nowadays is consumed over the Internet; and 2) The analysis didn’t control for factors that might influence both Fox News viewership and lower political knowledge.”
“I was originally pretty skeptical of the claim — and I came into the research with that skepticism in hand. For one, there are many different kinds of ‘political knowledge,’ so an all-encompassing effect suggested by headlines and people’s conversational references to the study seemed too over-the-top — and news consumption tends to be positively correlated with political knowledge in general,” Licari explained.
“I realized I knew of a dataset where I could address these issues. I wanted to ‘productively procrastinate’ on my dissertation looking at how video games can increase civic attitudes and political participation, so I dug in.”
For the study, Licari analyzed nationally representative data from 2016 wave of the American National Election Studies. The surveys asked respondents to report their use of online news media sources, including ABC News, BuzzFeed, CNN, Fox News, The Huffington Post, NBC News, The Washington Post, and other outlets.
After controlling for age, gender, race, education, political ideology and other factors, Licari found that using Fox’s website as a news source was associated with lower levels of some types of political knowledge, but not others.
“For some kinds of knowledge, there’s little reason to suspect an association between getting one’s news from FoxNews.com and less knowledge (what I term ‘process-oriented knowledge’ in the paper — or facts about the political system and how things are run),” Licari told PsyPost.
Process-oriented knowledge included things like knowing which party currently had the most members in the U.S. House of Representatives, how many years a United States Senator is elected for, and the political office held by John Roberts.
“But, for other kinds of knowledge (what I call ‘society-oriented knowledge’ comprising important facts about society and things affecting society), the evidence does point to a possible association between visiting the site and lower levels of knowledge,” Licari explained.
Examples of society-oriented knowledge included whether unemployment had gotten better or worse over the past year, whether Barack Obama was a Muslim, and whether the world’s temperature had been slowly increasing over the past 100 years.
“Taking-in additional online sources other than FoxNew.com diminished the negative effect, but the models suggest that, for the vast majority of people, the society-oriented knowledge gap between visitors and non-visitors is pretty durable. That association is statistically and — I feel — substantively significant,” Licari said.
But as with all research, the study includes some limitations.
“First and foremost, this study could only measure statistical associations; it’s not designed to make a causal argument and people should be cautious in interpreting it as such. I included as many controls as I could sensibly do to try and limit the possibility of there being a spurious factor lurking there (such as Party ID, ideology, age, education, 2012 presidential vote, the number of conservative media sources respondents took-in overall, to name a few), but there could always be other unmeasured factors out there in the ether driving both variables,” Licari said.
“It could also be that the causal arrow is reversed. I don’t personally believe it is, but we have to be open to that possibility until other work better-positioned from a causal inference standpoint comes along and settles the issue.”
“I also wish that there were items in the dataset that could make the society-oriented knowledge scale less partisan. There are some things there (like climate change) with a definite partisan lean when it comes to getting the ‘right answer.’ That lean will undoubtedly inject some bias into the measure and into the conclusions. Although, the effects are robust even when those items are nixed from the scale and it just becomes about economic knowledge — so I think that there’s something interesting there that’s still worth following-up on and pursuing,” Licari added.
The researcher hopes his work will inspire additional investigations into the relationship between news media consumption and political knowledge.
“I think that looking at possible informational biases associated with a mainstream news outlet is important work. (And regardless of what Fox’s pundits and uber-fans say — they’re mainstream. You can either be the nation’s most viewed news network or be not-mainstream; can’t have it both ways!) I’d like to see future work come and build off the limitations I know to be there as well as those that undoubtedly are there that I’m not aware of,” he told PsyPost.
“I think, given how many pundits on the network were (and are) skeptical of the COVID-19 outbreak, there might be an understandable temptation to link this paper with the skepticism that is more common among the US right. I’d personally suggest not doing so,” Licari added.
Political conservatism was associated with heightened susceptibility to believing fake news about COVID-19 in the early stages of the outbreak in the United States, according to new research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The study provides preliminary evidence that support for President Donald Trump plays a role in viewing COVID-19 as less of a personal threat and less severe in general.
“When we launched the project in early March, Dustin Calvillo (the first author) and I were talking about the discrepancy with which the threat was being viewed by different people,” said study author Abraham M. Rutchick, a professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge.
“I’d just begun a pretty strict self-quarantine, and I was struck by how varied people’s attitudes and behaviors were. Given the polarization of political leadership and politicized media, we thought this might be worth investigating.”
The researchers used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to conduct two online studies that included 990 participants in total. The first study was conducted on March 8, while the second was conducted on March 17, just a few days after a national emergency was declared in the United States.
As part of the research, the participants were asked to view and rate the accuracy of 16 news headlines. Eight of the headlines included real information taken from USNews.com, while the remaining eight were fake headlines derived from fact-checking websites.
Two examples of fake headlines that were used in the study.
Rutchick and his colleagues found that those who scored higher on a measure of political conservatism tended to be less accurate at distinguishing between real and fake headlines about COVID-19. Conservatism was also associated with perceiving less personal vulnerability and rating COVID-19 as less severe. More conservative participants were also more likely to believe that COVID-19 was the result of a conspiracy and that the media had exaggerated its risks.
More conservative participants also tended to view President Trump’s performance more positively. Approval of Trump was in turn associated with less knowledge about COVID-19, which predicted greater susceptibility to fake news headlines.
The findings indicate that “our responses to the threat are strikingly different depending on our political beliefs. This is probably due to people taking their cues from the president (or refusing to do so), and differences in the media from which people get their news. More broadly, the study shows how hard it is to get aligned on any issue with political overtones, even when it’s a matter of public health that affects everyone,” Rutchick told PsyPost.
When it came to media consumption habits, the researchers found significant differences based on party affiliation. About 32% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from CNN; 20% of Republicans and 50% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from The New York Times; and 51% of Republicans but only 14% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from Fox News.
“The more news participants got from Fox News, the less vulnerable they felt, and the more they agreed that the pandemic is a result of a conspiracy and that the media is exaggerating the threat. The more news participants got from CNN, the more severe they believed COVID-19 was, and the less they agreed that the media is exaggerating the threat,” the researchers said.
But the study — like all research — includes some limitations.
“The sampling was nonrepresentative and imperfect. And the analyses we used to examine the reasons why political ideology predicts threat perceptions – the idea that it’s via presidential approval, knowledge, and fake news discernment – is definitely a speculative one. The study was also conducted at one specific point in time – it’s a snapshot of what was going on in early March. We don’t know (from this study) much about how these processes unfold over time,” Rutchick explained.
“I’d argue that it’s essential for people to read unbiased media (and track media using things like allsides.com). We’re in a challenging age – it used to be that people would agree on what the truth was but disagree about what to do about it. Now, we can’t even agree on the truth on the ground, which is a grave threat to a functioning democracy,” he added.
