The Supply of Motivated Beliefs

Michael Thaler

No 11828, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: When people choose how to communicate, they must consider whether their audience will be biased in interpreting their messages. This paper experimentally examines how politically-motivated reasoning affects information transmission. Senders are randomly matched with receivers whose political parties' stances happen to be aligned or misaligned with a truthful statement, and either face incentives to be rated as truthful or face no incentives. Incentives for senders to be rated as truthful backfire, causing senders to be less truthful. Backfiring occurs because incentivized senders tailor false messages to better align with receivers' politically-motivated beliefs. Receivers are naive to these incentives' adverse effects.

JEL-codes: C91 D83 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
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https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11828.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Supply of Motivated Beliefs (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11828

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