The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions : Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs about Politics D . J . Flynn Pgm . in

Political misperceptions can distort public debate and undermine people’s ability to form meaningful opinions. Why do people often hold these false or unsupported beliefs and why is it sometimes so di cult to convince them otherwise? We argue that political misperceptions are typically rooted in directionally motivated reasoning, which limits the e↵ectiveness of corrective information about controversial issues and political figures. We discuss factors known to a↵ect the prevalence of directionally motivated reasoning and assess strategies for accurately measuring misperceptions in surveys. Finally, we address the normative implications of misperceptions for democracy and suggest important topics for future research. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 682758). We thank Adam Berinsky, Daniel Diermeier, Jamie Druckman, Ben Page, Ethan Porter, Gaurav Sood, Joe Uscinski, attendees at the University of Michigan conference on How We Can Improve Health Science Communication, and especially the anonymous reviewers for useful suggestions and feedback. All remaining errors are of course our own. Scholars have long debated whether citizens are knowledgeable enough to participate meaningfully in politics. While standards of democratic competence vary (e.g., Lupia 2006; Druckman 2012), empirical research in public opinion yields a relatively simple answer to the question of how much people typically know about politics: not very much (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). However, the meaning and significance of citizens’ inability to provide correct answers to factual survey questions can vary dramatically. Most notably, as Kuklinski et al. (2000) point out, there is an important distinction between being uninformed (not having a belief about the correct answer to a factual question) and being mis informed (holding a false or unsupported belief about the answer). While scholars have long lamented public ignorance about politics, misperceptions (i.e., being misinformed) may be an even greater concern. In particular, misperceptions can distort people’s opinions about some of the most consequential issues in politics, health, and medicine. Widespread evidence already exists of how misinformation has prevented human societies from recognizing environmental threats like climate change, embracing potentially valuable innovations such as genetically modified foods, and e↵ectively countering disease epidemics like HIV/AIDS. In the United States, misperceptions have featured prominently in some of the most salient policy debates of recent decades. Our goal in this article is to integrate the emerging literature on misperceptions into a more comprehensive theoretical framework. We first provide our preferred definition of misperceptions and document the evidence of their prevalence. Second, we argue that political misperceptions are typically rooted in directionally motivated reasoning, which is consistent with both observational and experimental evidence. As we note, however, there are significant theoretical and empirical