On Monday, March 24, 2025, Dr. Nick Stagnaro, senior research fellow at Stanford University and postdoctoral researcher at MIT, presented his talk, “Accurate Information Can Substantially and Durably Increase U.S. Republicans’ Beliefs in Election Integrity.” at the SP Colloquium Brownbag.
You can find more information about Dr. Stagnaro's work here and his abstract below:
Abstract:
Low confidence in the integrity of elections is a growing concern in the US, with particularly low trust levels among individuals on the political right. While this issue appears to be one of an uninformed or misinformed electorate, a common assumption in the social sciences is that providing people with accurate information is unlikely to help in such cases as people ignore or reject evidence that challenges their political beliefs. This is an especially common assumption in the context of contentious issues where partisan identities are strongly activated. To examine the validity of this dominant view, as well as attempt to formulate some solution to the above problem, we develop and test an informational intervention that exposes participants to evidence on election integrity that is highly accurate, balanced, and unbiased. In the days preceding the 2024 general election, we randomly assigned N = 780 Republicans to either the experimental intervention or a control group engaging with general political information. The intervention substantially and durably increased participants’ (1) overall beliefs about the integrity of US elections, (2) retrospective beliefs about the integrity of the 2020 election, and (3) prospective beliefs about the expected integrity of the upcoming 2024 election. A pre-post analysis reveals that individuals in the experimental condition increased their beliefs in election integrity by 10% to 14%, and comparing between conditions reveals large treatment effects (.4 < d < .8). Furthermore, a post-election follow-up shows that the effects persist for at least two weeks and in the face of a Republican presidential win. Overall, this work provides strong evidence that, when administered strategically, information can be a powerful tool to move people’s political beliefs toward the truth.