When Confirmation Bias Outweighs Expertise: A Factorial Survey On Credibility Judgments Of Polarizing Covid-19 News

Sandra Walzenbach and Thomas Hinz

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: In today’s digital media landscape, individuals must judge the credibility of competing information from an unprecedented range of sources, including established news organizations, political actors, unverified online voices and self-declared experts. Building on a theoretical discussion of how the internet and social media – with its algorithmic curation, its omnipresent misinformation and strategic disinformation – have altered media consumption, this study examines the challenges individuals face in evaluating the credibility of media content. Informed by dual-process theory and the concept of motivated reasoning, we explore the roles of both belief-consistency and established quality cues (namely source expertise and data references) in shaping credibility judgments. We use the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany as a case study of polarization, contrasting an inconspicuous majority with a vocal minority represented by the “Querdenker” protest movement. Heavily relying on social media, this movement mobilized a heterogeneous base of supporters united by deep-rooted mistrust of politics, science, and mainstream media. To investigate these dynamics, we conducted a factorial survey experiment in which a general population sample evaluated the credibility of Covid-19–related media content. The results provide strong evidence of confirmation bias, no detectable effect of quality cues, and remarkably similar evaluation strategies across both groups.

Keywords: public opinion; media perception; polarization; Covid-19; confirmation bias; factorial survey experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-exp and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:324165

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