title: Political Orientation Predicts Credulity Regarding Putative Hazards.
abstract: To benefit from information provided by other people, people must be somewhat credulous. However, credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing misinformation and failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, given that disregarding accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no equivalent asymmetry exists for information concerning benefits, people should generally be more credulous of hazard information than of benefit information. This adaptive negatively biased credulity is linked to negativity bias in general and is more prominent among people who believe the world to be more dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and beliefs about the dangerousness of the world differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively correlate with negatively biased credulity. Two online studies of Americans supported this prediction, potentially illuminating how politicians' alarmist claims affect different portions of the electorate.
authors.affiliation: 1 Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles.|2 Center for Behavior, Evolution, & Culture, University of California, Los Angeles.
authors.forename: Daniel M T
authors.initials: DMT
authors.lastname: Fessler
authors.affiliation: 3 Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara.|4 Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Anne C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Pisor
authors.affiliation: 1 Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles.|2 Center for Behavior, Evolution, & Culture, University of California, Los Angeles.
authors.forename: Colin
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Holbrook
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003142:Communication; D003617:Dangerous Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009341:Negativism; D011057:Politics; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D014481:United States / Q000208:ethnology
keywords: negatively biased credulity; negativity bias; open data; open materials; political orientation; threat sensitivity