Using Cash Rewards to Make Partisans Less Partisan

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Ask a Democrat how Obama has done on unemployment, and you’ll get a positive answer. Ask a Republican and you’ll get a negative answer. Ask them both about George Bush instead and the results will be reversed. Is this because political partisans really and truly see the truth differently? A team of researchers decided to conduct a couple of tests to find out:

In both experiments, all subjects were asked factual questions, but some were given financial incentives to answer correctly. In both experiments, we find that the incentives reduce partisan divergence substantially—on average, by about 55% and 60% across all of the questions for which partisan gaps appear when subjects are not incentivized.

….In our second experiment, we therefore implement a treatment in which subjects were offered incentives both for correct responses and for admitting that they did not know the correct response. We find that partisan gaps are even smaller in this condition—about 80% smaller than for unincentivized responses. This finding suggests that partisan divergence is driven by both expressive behavior and by respondents’ knowledge that they do not actually know the correct answers. These results have important implications for our understanding of public opinion. Most importantly, they call into question the claim that partisan divergence in beliefs about factual questions is ground for concern about voters’ abilities to hold incumbents accountable for their performance. Partisans may disagree in surveys, but we should not take these differences at face value.

In other words, don’t take polls like this too seriously. Even partisans mostly know the truth, but when they’re asked questions with actual numeric answers they take the opportunity to trash politicians they don’t like instead of answering correctly. After all, that’s more fun, and there’s no payoff for an accurate answer.

This might be true. But I think there’s an alternate possibility: partisans are likely to answer a bit more accurately when they’re forced to actually think about their answers. The cash reward is just a way of demonstrating that the pollster is serious about wanting accurate answers. But does this mean that partisans really do know the truth, and are therefore better than we think at holding incumbents accountable? I wouldn’t make that leap. Campaigns, after all, are precisely the opposite of this test condition: an environment in which partisans are actively encouraged not to think about their answers. And that means they probably don’t. During the heat of a campaign, their true beliefs are probably a lot closer to the inaccurate answers they gave when there was no incentive to think hard.

In any case, I wonder who cares? Partisans are the very people least likely to hold anyone accountable in the first place. By definition, they’re the ones who just vote by party. A more interesting experiment would test for accurate responses among nonpartisans, the only group that might be likely to abandon cheerleading during a campaign and try to seek out the truth—though I think it’s unlikely even in that case.

This is an interesting study (though I’d note that the questions they ask are really hard), but I’m not sure I’d take it too seriously just yet. I doubt that it tells us anything about actual voting behavior.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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