Political Orientation Predicts Credulity Regarding Putative Hazards
研究发现，由于忽视真实警告比采取不必要预防措施代价更高，人们对危害信息比对利益信息更易轻信，且这种负向偏差在保守派中更明显，有助于理解政客危言耸听的言论对不同选民的影响。
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.