ArticleNature human behaviour2023
Partisans' receptivity to persuasive messaging is undiminished by countervailing party leader cues.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A meta-analysis of correction effects in science-relevant misinformation.Nature human behaviour · 2023Pooled it
- Article
- Effects of land acknowledgements on non-Indigenous audiences in Australia and the USA.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Can a public information campaign increase trust in American elections?Science advances · 2026Article
- Biased AI writing assistants shift users' attitudes on societal issues.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- The Bias-and-Expertise Model: A Bayesian Network Model of Political Source Characteristics.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Endorsements vs. information: Experimental evidence of backlash and parallel persuasion during the COVID-19 public health crisis.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Scaling language model size yields diminishing returns for single-message political persuasion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Persuading partisans.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is widely assumed that party identification and loyalty can distort partisans' information processing, diminishing their receptivity to counter-partisan arguments and evidence. Here we empirically evaluate this assumption. We test whether American partisans' receptivity to arguments and evidence is diminished by countervailing cues from in-party leaders (Donald Trump or Joe Biden), using a survey experiment with 24 contemporary policy issues and 48 persuasive messages containing arguments and evidence (N = 4,531; 22,499 observations). We find that, while in-party leader cues influenced partisans' attitudes, often more strongly than the persuasive messages, there was no evidence that the cues meaningfully diminished partisans' receptivity to the messages-despite them directly contradicting the messages. Rather, persuasive messages and countervailing leader cues were integrated as independent pieces of information. These results generalized across policy issues, demographic subgroups and cue environments, and challenge existing assumptions about the extent to which party identification and loyalty distort partisans' information processing.
Indexed as
Identifiers
36864137What 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.