Less Partisan but No More Competent: Expressive Responding and Fact-Opinion Discernment

Abstract Research suggests that partisanship interferes with people’s ability to distinguish between factually verifiable statements and opinion statements. We investigate the degree to which observed partisan bias in fact-opinion discernment is due to expressive responding: partisans may claim that congenial opinions are facts, and that uncongenial facts are opinions, because they want to express their partisan attitude toward the statement. Four experiments (total N = 10,614) show that expressive responding substantially inflates measured partisan differences in fact/opinion classifications, by more than 50 percent in the United States and about 30 percent in Israel. Despite this, we find little evidence that our treatments increased the proportion of correct classifications. In other words, although expressive responding makes people look more partisan than they really are, it does not lead surveys to underestimate the average person’s ability to distinguish fact from opinion. These results are compatible because of a rarely noted implication of expressive responding theory: when the correct answer is party congenial, expressive responding makes people look more competent than they really are. Notably, expressive responding emerged despite the survey instrument’s instructions not to respond in this manner. This suggests that approaches that rely on instructions or requests may be too weak to eliminate expressive responding.