Every decision an individual makes is based partly on the individual's information about the alternatives. For political decisions, this information comes primarily from two sources: the media and informal discussion with friends and family. Obtaining information from the media is costly because individuals may lack the motivation, the ability, or the opportunity to learn. Individuals who are able to learn about politics participate more frequently and participate more effectively. People who lack political information have two alternatives if they hope to participate effectively in politics: pay the costs to become informed or find a low cost means that will help them act as the informed do. Many scholars argue that the latter is preferable and suggest that low cost information is readily available in the form of political discussion. This project is concerned primarily with two questions about how individuals use political discussion to make decisions. First, to what extent do individuals learn factual information from their discussion partners? Second, do uninformed individuals with expert discussion partners vote the same way that informed individuals vote?
This project uses multiple methods to examine the factors that promote and inhibit learning of political facts through social communication. Analysis of survey data suggests partisan discussion partners bias evaluations of objective conditions. Further, individuals with better informed discussion partners do not vote as informed individuals vote. The survey data, however, does not provide the researcher with the actual messages that discussion partners are communicating. Because of this, it is not clear why political discussion is not a more effective means of communicating political information.
To examine this question, this project uses an experiment to provide the investigator with the data necessary to evaluate the communication conditions that are optimal for learning facts and using those facts to make better decisions. In the experiment, subjects learn the proposals of two computer-generated candidates and then vote for the candidate whose proposals award them more money. Subjects determine the payoff from proposals using private information provided to them. On average, this information is accurate, but any single piece of information may be inaccurate. They also receive information from other subjects. The socially communicated information may come from sources that are uninformed or biased in favor of one of the candidates. Many researchers see social communication as a low cost means for the uninformed to learn about politics. This project will either demonstrate that social communication is a viable path to information for these groups or explain why hurdles remain. This project will have broader impacts by showing political organizers how to improve communications with the less informed as one means of stimulating political participation. By having undergraduate students participate in the experiments, this project would also teach students about social scientific approaches to examining human behavior.
