ArticleCognition2019
Epistemic spillovers: Learning others' political views reduces the ability to assess and use their expertise in nonpolitical domains.
Article in Cognition, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 105 citations in OpenAlex.
- Prior preferences interfere with the associative learning of food values.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Lobbying, fast and slow: principles of influence beyond reason.Interest groups & advocacy · 2026Article
- The Bias-and-Expertise Model: A Bayesian Network Model of Political Source Characteristics.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Behavioral science of voting in hypothetical utopia and dystopia scenarios: a predictive modeling approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The persuasive effects of social cues and source effects on misinformation susceptibility.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The intentions of information sources can affect what information people think qualifies as true.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Political coherence and certainty as drivers of interpersonal liking over and above similarity.Science advances · 2022Article
- Religious identity cues increase vaccination intentions and trust in medical experts among American Christians.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Cognitive Neuroscience Meets the Community of Knowledge.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
- The role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in automatic formation of impression and reflected impression.Human brain mapping · 2020Article
- Bound to the group and blinded by the leader: ideological leader-follower dynamics in a trust economic game.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
On political questions, many people prefer to consult and learn from those whose political views are similar to their own, thus creating a risk of echo chambers or information cocoons. We test whether the tendency to prefer knowledge from the politically like-minded generalizes to domains that have nothing to do with politics, even when evidence indicates that politically like-minded people are less skilled in those domains than people with dissimilar political views. Participants had multiple opportunities to learn about others' (1) political opinions and (2) ability to categorize geometric shapes. They then decided to whom to turn for advice when solving an incentivized shape categorization task. We find that participants falsely concluded that politically like-minded others were better at categorizing shapes and thus chose to hear from them. Participants were also more influenced by politically like-minded others, even when they had good reason not to be. These results replicate in two independent samples. The findings demonstrate that knowing about others' political views interferes with the ability to learn about their competency in unrelated tasks, leading to suboptimal information-seeking decisions and errors in judgement. Our findings have implications for political polarization and social learning in the midst of political divisions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.