Keywords

Social psychology; Political psychology; Personality psychology; Belief updating; Political polarization; American politics

Abstract

Belief updating is a research area investigating how individuals refine or fail to refine their preexisting beliefs when confronted with corrective sources. Understanding the various drivers of poor belief updating in a political context is essential to maintaining an informed democracy, as the ideal voter in a democratic nation updates political misconceptions and false beliefs when presented with corrective sources. Despite the importance of this topic, the literature examining potential factors that could contribute to poor belief updating in a political context remains particularly limited. I aimed to address this limitation by recruiting undergraduates from the University of Central Florida’s Psychology Department via SONA to complete an online survey. This survey investigated misplaced certainty, right-wing authoritarianism, belief in a just world, Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and external locus of control as novel predictors of belief updating in a political context. Regarding past literature examining these personality variables in general belief updating and general political contexts, I hypothesized that participants who scored higher on these various personality measures would be less likely to learn from corrective sources and revise their misconceptions and false beliefs in a politically centered feedback-learning task. Overall, the data did not support this hypothesis, as only misplaced certainty, right-wing authoritarianism, and subclinical narcissism significantly predicted poor belief updating. Further, right-wing authoritarianism was the only unique predictor when controlling all variables, and it had a particularly weak linear relationship with belief updating. These results indicate that the mechanisms contributing to belief updating in a political context are too complex to be adequately predicted by personality factors alone.

Thesis Completion Year

2024

Thesis Completion Semester

Fall

Thesis Chair

Hubertz, Martha

College

College of Sciences

Department

Psychology

Thesis Discipline

Psychology

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Length of Campus Access

None

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

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Rights Statement

In Copyright