HOW DO PEOPLE CHOOSE BETWEEN BIASED INFORMATION SOURCES? EVIDENCE FROM A LABORATORY EXPERIMENT

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Charness, Gary; Oprea, Ryan; Yuksel, Sevgi
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvaa051
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 1656-1691
• 关键词: media; confirmation; consumption; selection; CHOICE; MODEL

摘要

People in our experiment choose between two information sources with opposing biases in order to inform their guesses about a binary state. By varying the nature of the bias, we vary whether it is optimal to consult information sources biased towards or against prior beliefs. Even in our deliberately-abstract setting, there is strong evidence of confirmation-seeking and to a lesser extent contradiction-seeking heuristics leading people to choose information sources biased towards or against their priors. Analysis of post-experiment survey questions suggests that subjects follow these rules due to fundamental errors in reasoning about the relative informativeness of biased information sources.