The Causal Effect of Communication in Echo Chambers on Biased BeliefsAlicia von Schenk
24. November 2022
Alicia von Schenk (University of Würzburg) presents his project TBA in our Microeconomics Research Seminar @VMP5, Room 0079, on Thursday, November 24, 5:15-6:45 PM.
Abstract: This paper presents a laboratory experiment to isolate the causal effect of communicating in echo chambers on the prevalence of biased beliefs in the population. For this purpose, we exogenously manipulate subjects' incentives to form motivated beliefs about others' behavior and fairness. We further vary whether subjects with the same incentive to distort their own belief can communicate via free-form chats. We find that communication - even in the exogenously created echo chambers - reduces the bias in individuals' beliefs. Additionally, we analyze how the communication with like-minded individuals affects the distribution of beliefs in the experiment. Without the incentives to form motivated beliefs, we have two opinion camps. Motivated reasoning without chatting reduces the fair opinion camp at the expense of the unfair opinion camp. Chatting undoes motivated reasoning and thereby leads to the reemergence of the original fair opinion camp.