IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jeurec/v19y2021i3p1656-1691..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How do People Choose Between Biased Information Sources? Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Gary Charness
  • Ryan Oprea
  • Sevgi Yuksel

Abstract

People in our experiment choose between two information sources with opposing biases in order to inform their guesses about a binary state. By varying the nature of the bias, we vary whether it is optimal to consult information sources biased towards or against prior beliefs. Even in our deliberately-abstract setting, there is strong evidence of confirmation-seeking and to a lesser extent contradiction-seeking heuristics leading people to choose information sources biased towards or against their priors. Analysis of post-experiment survey questions suggests that subjects follow these rules due to fundamental errors in reasoning about the relative informativeness of biased information sources.

Suggested Citation

  • Gary Charness & Ryan Oprea & Sevgi Yuksel, 2021. "How do People Choose Between Biased Information Sources? Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 19(3), pages 1656-1691.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:19:y:2021:i:3:p:1656-1691.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvaa051
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brandts, Jordi & Busom, Isabel & Lopez-Mayan, Cristina & Panadés, Judith, 2022. "Dispelling misconceptions about economics," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    2. Evan M. Calford & Anujit Charkraborty, 2022. "The Value of and Demand for Diverse News Sources," ANU Working Papers in Economics and Econometrics 2022-688, Australian National University, College of Business and Economics, School of Economics.
    3. Felix Chopra & Ingar K. Haaland & Christopher Roth, 2022. "The Demand for News: Accuracy Concerns Versus Belief Confirmation Motives," CESifo Working Paper Series 9673, CESifo.
    4. Vladimir Novak & Andrei Matveenko & Silvio Ravaioli, 2021. "The Status Quo and Belief Polarization of Inattentive Agents: Theory and Experiment," Working Papers 674, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
    5. Castagnetti, Alessandro & Schmacker, Renke, 2022. "Protecting the ego: Motivated information selection and updating," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 142(C).
    6. Islam, Marco, 2021. "Motivated Risk Assessments," Working Papers 2021:12, Lund University, Department of Economics, revised 26 Jul 2022.
    7. Aljoscha Minnich & Hauke Roggenkamp & Andreas Lange, 2023. "Ambiguity Attitudes and Surprises: Experimental Evidence on Communicating New Information within a Large Population Sample," CESifo Working Paper Series 10783, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:19:y:2021:i:3:p:1656-1691.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jeea .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.