Groupy Belief FormationMichael Kosfeld

20 April 2023

Michael Kosfeld (Goethe University Frankfurt/Main), 17:15 - 18:45, presents his project in the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar of the GRK "Collective Decision-Making”.

This seminar will take place in person. Please register (if you haven’t already) here if you want to attend the seminar. We invite everyone interested to attend!

Location: Room 0079, Von-Melle-Park 5

Abstract

We analyze how group identity influences the process of political and non-political belief formation. Using an online experiment with nationally-representative participants, deployed the week prior to the 2020 US presidential election, we incentivize subjects to predict policy-sensitive statistics one year post-election, conditional on which candidate becomes president. We assess group identity through in-group favoritism in monetary allocations in a minimal-group context. Our results show that participants who exhibit ingroup favoritism show a stronger partisan gap in prior and posterior beliefs and spend more resources to avoid articles from politically-opposing sources. Results replicate in a neutral, non-political prediction task, where we can control for participants’ subjective beliefs about the quality of out-group information.

Find the abstract as PDF here.