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Does Counter-Attitudinal Information Cause Backlash? Results from Three Large Survey Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2018

Andrew Guess  and
Alexander Coppock
Andrew Guess*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Princeton University
Alexander Coppock
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Yale University
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Several theoretical perspectives suggest that when individuals are exposed to counter-attitudinal evidence or arguments, their pre-existing opinions and beliefs are reinforced, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes known as ‘backlash’. This article formalizes the concept of backlash and specifies how it can be measured. It then presents the results from three survey experiments – two on Mechanical Turk and one on a nationally representative sample – that find no evidence of backlash, even under theoretically favorable conditions. While a casual reading of the literature on information processing suggests that backlash is rampant, these results indicate that it is much rarer than commonly supposed.

Keywords

public opinionattitude polarizationmotivated reasoningbackfire effect
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 1497 - 1515
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018

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