The Department of Economics invites you to a talk titled ‘Where Can Financial Incentives Eliminate Partisan Answers to Factual Questions?’ by Dr. Tim Salmon, Southern Methodist University, on 12 November 2021 at 8:00 PM.
Abstract
Opinion surveys often show substantial gaps in how political partisans answer questions about factual matters. An encouraging finding is that prior literature has shown that these gaps can be substantially reduced by providing incentives in those surveys indicating that partisans do actually understand common facts but see little reason to demonstrate so in standard surveys. Recent partisan driven behavior regarding COVID and other issues calls these results into doubt as to whether they still apply. We conduct a survey experiment to try to determine the limits of the ability of incentives to eliminate partisan gaps in how people respond to surveys regarding factual questions. We first attempt to replicate prior questions where incentives worked and then extend the tests to new topics to determine if the prior results still hold and if they extend to these topics that are the current focus of substantial partisan misinformation campaigns.