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Shocking Belief Systems (SBS)

Project holder: 

Eugenio Verrina (Département d'économie, Sciences Po)

Research team:  

Arno Apffelstaedt (Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Cologne)

Project description: 

In this project, we start from the idea that political identities generate systems of motivated – and often inaccurate – beliefs. We study how a shock, i.e., information that contradicts an identity-relevant belief, propagates through people’s belief systems. We use two survey experiments to answer two related research questions. First, we ask how a shock affects the willingness to engage with identity-threatening information. Second, we ask how a shock affects the assessment of the veracity of identity-threatening or identity-strengthening information. We hypothesize that after a shock people will have a stronger desire to protect their belief system. Hence, we expect that they will be less inclined to consume identity- threatening information and that they will evaluate statements in line with their political identity as more likely to be true and statements that go against their political identity as less likely to be true. Our project has important implications for the design of policies aimed at correcting beliefs or reducing polarization, as it emphasizes that they might have unintended side-effects or even backfire.

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