Elections & Beliefs [RR]

This week let's explore how election beliefs form, who holds them, and why they're so hard to change.

Change Is Fraud

How does belief in election fraud can take hold, even without evidence? A surprisingly simple culprit might be our own cognitive biases, triggered by the very way we report election results.

The sequential, real-time reporting of partial vote counts fuels a "cumulative redundancy bias", making us instinctively favor the candidate who takes an early lead.

When the lead inevitably shifts as different types of votes (like mail-in ballots) are counted later, our brains can misinterpret this normal process as a sign of foul play. In experiments, participants consistently suspected fraud when the eventual winner gained a late lead, an effect that persisted even when the process was explained to them.

The problem isn't just misinformation but the information architecture itself. We are inadvertently designing systems for reporting results that are perfectly calibrated to exploit our cognitive flaws and generate distrust. In turn, this becomes a perfect wedge for extractive elites.

The solution may not be to simply persuade people differently, but to fundamentally redesign how we present information to be more resilient against our own predictable irrationality.

The Exception & The Rule

Why do facts seem so ineffective against conspiracy beliefs? The answer might lie less in the specific claims and more in the believer's own mind.

Individuals prone to conspiracy thinking are also dispositionally overconfident, consistently overestimating their own performance on unrelated cognitive tests “even after taking their actual performance into account”.

Even more strikingly, they live in a state of profound "false consensus". Conspiracy believers “massively overestimate”, by more than 4x, how many people agree with them. Even when their belief is held by a tiny fraction of the population, they perceive themselves to be in the silent “majority 93% of the time”, genuinely unaware that their views are on the fringe.

This combination of unearned confidence and a distorted view of social reality creates a powerful psychological shield against contradictory evidence. It's not just that they disagree with the facts; their entire perceived reality, both internal and social, reinforces their conviction.

This highlights the deep challenge of intervention: you're not just correcting a piece of misinformation; you're pushing against a person's fundamental, and often overconfident, sense of how the world works and their place within it.

It’s The Dynamics, Stupid

We all want a less divided society, and countless well-intentioned interventions aim to reduce partisan animosity. But do they actually work? Not really, and not for long.

The average effect of depolarization treatments is modest at best (“a 5.4-point shift on a 101-point scale”) and decays almost completely within 2 weeks. Even more discouragingly, "stacking" multiple interventions or repeating them as "booster shots" doesn't produce significantly larger or more durable results.

We are looking in the wrong place for a solution. The root of affective polarization isn't a simple deficit of individual empathy or understanding that can be "fixed" with a brief treatment. The real drivers are the elite behaviors and cultural incentives, in media and politics, that constantly fuel and profit from the conflict.

Lasting depolarization won't come from asking individuals to be better; it will come from re-engineering the system that rewards being worse. We must deal with the dynamical feedback between “elites” and masses.

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming