Credits: Social Media
New study reveals Americans struggle to tell difference between facts and opinion
A study was conducted to determine how well Americans can tell facts and opinions apart, and the results may be a cause for concern, especially with respect to politics.
The study by a team of scholars from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that Americans cannot distinguish facts and opinions “very well” for several reasons.
Study details if Americans can tell facts and opinions apart
The study aimed to find if Americans can differentiate between statements of facts (such as 2 + 2 = 4) and statements of opinion (such as “Green is the most beautiful color”), with a focus on political statements.
The respondents were asked to categorize 12 statements surrounding current events as fact or opinion, and researchers were shocked to find out that 45.75% of them “performed no better than a coin flip at the task.”
This essentially means that nearly half of the participants couldn’t tell if a statement they were presented with was a fact or an opinion, owing to partisan bias among other factors.
Partisan bias is when media leans towards a certain political ideology, consumed by the audience as is, becoming the “root cause of error.”
While four factors – civics knowledge, current events knowledge, education, and cognitive ability – were proven to decrease “unbiased error”, mistakes linked to partisan bias remained constant and weren’t random.
Although people with greater political sophistication were better at distinguishing fact from opinion, affective partisan polarization tends to promote systematic partisan error, said Matthew Mattler, a graduate student and co-author of the paper.
Why the results are concerning
While misinformation contributing to people’s lack of ability to tell facts and opinions apart could be mitigated with standard journalistic fact-checking, the partisan bias is still concerning.
The study notes that the strong role of people’s political leaning in their decision-making does not improve fact-opinion differentiation.
Furthermore, cable news is infamous for blurring the difference between facts and opinions, which is highly concerning ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
If you cant tell if somebody is proposing a statement of fact versus a statement of opinion, youre doomed as an information consumer,” political scientist Jeffery J. Mondak said.
