Well, you’re the expert: how signals of source expertise help mitigate partisan bias

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using low information rationality, citizens can compensate for their lack of political knowledge by turning to experts to help interpret and economize information. However, citizens must navigate a political media environment that is oversaturated with unqualified sources and competing cues, leading some scholars to question whether individuals are willing or able to utilize low-information rationality effectively. Much prior work focuses on partisan motivated reasoning, asserting that the influence of partisanship overwhelms that of other relevant informational cues. This is refuted by a relatively smaller subset of works, finding that the influence of partisanship is often diminished by contextual cues. I address this debate with two experimental designs that place source cues in a competing context by simultaneously manipulating expertise-related cues and partisan cues. I find that individuals do take source expertise and credibility into account, even when confronted with competing partisan source cues, helping to somewhat mitigate partisan biases.