Comments on Young et al 2022 "…misperceptions of COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election"
The Journal of Social and Political Psychology recently published Young et al 2022 "'I feel it in my gut:' Epistemic motivations, political beliefs, and misperceptions of COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election", which reported in its abstract that:
Results from a US national survey from Nov-Dec 2020 illustrate that Republicans, conservatives, and those favorable towards President Trump held greater misperceptions about COVID and the 2020 election.
Young et al 2022 contains two shortcomings of too much social science: bias and error.
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1.
In Young et al 2022, the selection of items measuring misperceptions is biased toward things that the political right is more likely than the political left to indicate a misperception about, so that the most that we can conclude from Young et al 2022 is that the political right more often reported misperceptions about things that the political right is more likely to report misperceptions about.
Young et al 2022 seems to acknowledge this research design flaw in the paragraph starting with:
Given the political valence of both COVID and election misinformation, these relationships might not apply to belief in liberal-serving misinformation.
But it's not clear to me why some misinformation about covid can't be liberal-serving. At least, there are misperceptions about covid that are presumably more common among the political left than among the political right.
For example, the eight-item Young et al 2022 covid misperceptions battery contains two items that permit respondents to underestimate the seriousness of covid-19: "Coronavirus (COVID-19 is a hoax" [sic for the unmatched parenthesis], and "The flu is more lethal than coronavirus (COVID-19)". But the battery doesn't contain corresponding items that permit respondents to overestimate the seriousness of covid-19.
Presumably, a higher percentage of the political left than the political right overestimated the seriousness of covid-19 at the time of the survey in late 2020, given that, in a different publication, a somewhat different Young et al team indicated that:
Results from a national survey of U.S. adults from Nov-Dec 2020 suggest that Trump favorability was...negatively associated with self-reported mask-wearing.
Another misperception measured in the survey is that "Asian American people are more likely to carry the virus than other people", which was not a true statement at the time. But, from what I can tell, at the time of the survey, covid rates in the United States were higher among Hispanics than among Whites, which presumably means that Hispanic Americans were more likely to carry the virus than White Americans. It's not clear to me why misinformation about the covid rate among Asians should be prioritized over misinformation about the covid rate among Hispanics, although, if someone wanted to bias the research design against the political right, that priority would make sense.
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Similar flaw with the Young et al 2022 election 2020 misperceptions battery, which had an item that permits overestimation of the detected voter fraud ("There was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election"), but had no item that would permit underestimation of voter fraud in 2020 (e.g., "There was no voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election"), which is the type of error that the political left would presumably be more likely to make.
For another example, Young et al 2022 had a reverse-coded misperceptions item for "We can never be sure that Biden's win was legitimate", but had no item about whether we can be sure that Trump's 2016 win was legitimate, which would be an obvious item to pair with the Biden item to assess whether the political right and the political left are equally misinformed or at least equally likely to give insincere responses to surveys that have items such as "The coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine will be used to implant people with microchips".
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So I think it's less, as Young et al 2022 suggested, that "COVID misinformation and election misinformation both served Republican political goals", and more that the selection of misinformation items in Young et al 2022 was biased toward a liberal-serving conclusion.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the political right is more misinformed than the political left in general or on selected topics. But it's not clear to me how Young et al 2022 can provide a valid inference about that.
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2.
For error, Young et al 2022 Table 3 has an unstandardized coefficient for Black race, indicating that, in the age 50 and older group, being Black corresponded to higher levels of Republicanism. I'm guessing that this coefficient is missing a negative sign, given that there is a negative sign on the standardized coefficient...The Table 2 income predictor for the age 18-49 group has an unstandardized coefficient of .04 and a standard error of .01, but no statistical significance asterisk, and has a standardized coefficient of .00, which I think might be too low...And the appendix indicates that "The analysis yielded two factors with Eigenvalues < 1.", but I think that should be a greater than symbol.
None of those potential errors are particularly important, except perhaps for inferences about phenomena such as the rigor of the peer and editorial review that Young et al 2022 went through.
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NOTES
1. Footnotes 3 and 4 of Young et al 2022 indicate that:
Consistent with Vraga and Bode (2020), misperceptions were operationalized as COVID-related beliefs that contradicted the "best available evidence" and/or "expert consensus" at the time data were gathered.
If the purpose is to assess whether "I feel it in my gut" people are incorrect, then the perceptions should be shown to be incorrect and not merely in contradiction to expert consensus or, for that matter, in contradiction to the best available evidence.
2. The funding statement for Young et al 2022 indicates that the study was funded by the National Institute of Aging.
3. Prior posts on politically biased selection of misinformation items, in Abrajano and Lajevardi 2021 and in the American National Election Studies 2020 Time Series Study.
4. After I started drafting the above post, Social Science Quarterly published Benegal and Motta 2022 "Overconfident, resentful, and misinformed: How racial animus motivates confidence in false beliefs", which used the politically biased ANES misinformation items, in which, for example, respondents who agree that "World temperatures have not risen on average over the last 100 years" get coded as misinformed (an error presumably more common on the political right) but respondents who wildly overestimate the amount of climate change over the past 100 years don't get coded as misinformed (an error presumably more common on the political left).
5. I might be crazy, but I think that research about the correlates of misperceptions should identify respondents who have correct perceptions instead of merely identifying respondents who have particular misperceptions.
And I don't think that researchers should place particular misperceptions into the same category as the correct perception, such as by asking respondents merely whether world temperatures have risen on average over the last 100 years, any more than researchers should ask respondents merely whether world temperatures have risen on average by at least 3 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years, for which agreement would be the misperception.