In the digital era, navigating the relentless surge of political information has become a daily challenge for Americans. Yet, a recent study spearheaded by scholars from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign reveals a concerning trend: many Americans find it difficult to differentiate between statements of fact and statements of opinion. This struggle poses significant implications for civic discourse and the ability to sift through political information effectively.
The findings have been published by the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review.
“The capacity to differentiate between a statement of opinion and a statement of fact is vital for citizens to manage the flood of political information they receive on any given day,” said study author Jeffery J. Mondak, a professor of political science and the James M. Benson Chair in Public Issues and Civic Leadership. “There’s a huge amount of research on misinformation. But what we found is that, even before we get to the stage of labeling something misinformation, people often have trouble discerning the difference between statements of fact and opinion.”
“We also see a lot of research on misinformation that comes at the problem from the angle of, ‘How are we doing in terms of playing whack-a-mole with misinformation? Are we able to fact check them and rebut these claims?’ Well, that isn’t necessarily a useful way of getting at the root cause of the problem,” said Matthew Mettler, a graduate student and co-author of the paper.
To investigate this, the researchers conducted an online survey designed to measure participants’ abilities to differentiate these types of statements, particularly within the context of political information. This survey was administered by YouGov, a reputable market research company, ensuring a broad and diverse demographic reach. The survey took place over five days, from March 9 to March 14, 2019, and successfully gathered responses from 2,500 individuals across the United States.
The core of the survey consisted of twelve statements about current events, deliberately chosen to cover a spectrum of topics likely to elicit varied responses based on participants’ political beliefs. These statements were split evenly to include both factual claims (such as “ISIS lost a significant portion of its territory in Iraq and Syria in 2017”) and opinions (for example, “Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy”).
Participants were asked to categorize each statement as either a fact or an opinion, providing researchers with direct insight into their capacity for discerning factual information from subjective viewpoints.
One of the most striking findings was that a substantial portion of the respondents, approximately 45.7%, performed no better than chance when tasked with identifying statements as fact or opinion. This suggests that nearly half of the surveyed population could not reliably discern factual information from personal beliefs or subjective statements. This finding is alarming, as it underscores a fundamental challenge in the public’s ability to engage critically with information, a skill that is crucial for informed decision-making and civic engagement.
“What we’re showing here is that people have trouble distinguishing factual claims from opinion, and if we don’t have this shared sense of reality, then standard journalistic fact-checking – which is more curative than preventative – is not going to be a productive way of defanging misinformation,” Mondak said. “How can you have productive discourse about issues if you’re not only disagreeing on a basic set of facts, but you’re also disagreeing on the more fundamental nature of what a fact itself is?”
The study highlighted the significant role of partisan bias in shaping how individuals interpret statements. Partisan bias led respondents to categorize statements in ways that aligned with their political affiliations, often viewing statements favorable to their party as factual and those unfavorable as opinionated. This bias was systematic and strong, indicating that political polarization can deeply affect the perception of reality.
“As partisan political views grow more polarized, Democrats and Republicans both tend to construct an alternate reality in which they report that their side has marshalled the facts and the other side merely has opinions,” Mondak said.
The researchers identified four main factors that modestly improved participants’ success at differentiating between facts and opinions: civics knowledge, current events knowledge, cognitive ability, and education. These factors are indicative of a person’s political sophistication, suggesting that a higher degree of engagement with civic matters and a better understanding of current events, along with cognitive skills and educational background, can enhance one’s ability to navigate the complex information landscape. However, the improvement attributed to these factors was only modest.
Interestingly, while political sophistication factors like civics knowledge and education helped reduce errors that were not associated with partisan bias (unbiased errors), they did little to diminish errors driven by partisan bias. This finding implies that partisan bias is a robust influence that can override the benefits of political sophistication when it comes to distinguishing between fact and opinion.
The persistence of partisan bias suggests that simply increasing political knowledge or cognitive skills may not be sufficient to overcome the challenges posed by political polarization in the interpretation of information. These findings are in line with previous research, which has provided evidence that while greater news media literacy can help individuals be skeptical about information from unfamiliar sources, strong partisan biases can reverse this skepticism, especially in the case of fake news.
“It’s not merely the case that there were a lot of incorrect responses, but that many of the errors were not random,” Mondak said. “They were systematic errors because many respondents formed their answers to fit their partisan narrative. For example, the statement ‘President Barack Obama was born in the U.S.’ is a statement of fact that could be incorrectly redefined as a statement of opinion, depending on your partisan lens.”
“Although people with greater political sophistication were better at distinguishing fact from opinion, affective partisan polarization tends to promote systematic partisan error,” Mettler added. “It distorts people’s capacity to reason their way through these statements.”
The study’s results paint a concerning picture of the state of public discourse, especially in the context of political information. The difficulty many Americans face in distinguishing facts from opinions, compounded by the exacerbating effect of partisan bias, poses significant challenges for democratic engagement and the collective decision-making process.
“If you can’t tell if somebody is proposing a statement of fact versus a statement of opinion, you’re doomed as an information consumer,” Mondak said. “It signals a fundamental breakdown in the possibility of meaningful communication between people and political elites, or between journalists and the public.”
The study, “Fact-opinion differentiation,” was published March 7, 2024.