In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Sienna Nordquist, covers the new article by Sumitra Badrinathan, Simon Chauchard, and Niloufer Siddiqui, “Misinformation and Support for Vigilantism: An Experiment in India and Pakistan”.
In divided societies, religious and ethnic differences can become a lightning rod for conflict and violence. Misinformation has the ability to not only set this issue alight, but to also motivate collective violence against innocent individuals. There is perhaps no better area of the world to study this horrific social dynamic than India and Pakistan, where distrust towards Muslims, Hindus, and other religious and ethnic minorities drives group attacks on individuals. In a recent APSR article, Sumitra Badrinathan, Simon Chauchard, and Niloufer Siddiqui directly investigate vigilante violence, and the possibility for correcting misinformation to change support for these dangerous acts. They discover that correcting false information has the ability to reduce the credibility of the false rumors and personal support for vigilante violence in reaction to the misinformation. These findings held true in both India and Pakistan and for many different types of false rumors, although there was a larger decrease in support for vigilante violence in Pakistan than in India. Within India, belief in at least one rumor congruent to the ruling party’s agenda remained impossible to move.
Distrust towards Muslims in India and non-Muslims in Pakistan is not only widespread, but nearly universal in their respective countries. Amidst a political context where religious nationalist parties—like the BJP in India—are winning broad popular support, incidental or targeted misinformation about outgroups can quickly spiral into unsanctioned violence. The rumors can spread very quickly on messaging apps like WhatsApp and are propelled by a distrust towards minorities. The misinformation is rarely contested in highly polarized ethnic and religious contexts, which is why it is so crucial to understand if any messaging corrections could sway individuals’ beliefs about the false stories and their support for vigilante violence.
The authors study how individuals respond to rumors and corrections to these same rumors in field experiments in India and Pakistan. The experiment recruited individuals to listen via private headphones in their home to media-like recordings about the alleged incident or issue in Uttar Pradesh, India, and Punjab, Pakistan. These locations were chosen because they are the epicenter of vigilante violence, lynchings, and blasphemy cases in the two countries. In the treatment group, the newscaster would not only read about the incident—such as an individual burning a Quran in Pakistan or a story that Muslims were purposefully spreading COVID-19 in India—but also convey a lengthy message on how multiple media outlets verified the story or incident was untrue. The authors purposefully wanted the correction of the false information to be overt and strong, in order to see if any dispelling of the rumor was effective in changing attitudes. They note, however, that fact-checking in the real world is more likely to be done in small or simple phrases, like what you might see overwritten social media messages online; and therefore, that there are some limitations in how their study relates to how many identity-based rumors spread in political messaging.
The authors determine that correcting false stories about out-group members significantly reduces individual support for vigilantism and how much individuals believe those in their neighborhood would support vigilantism. But to their surprise, the same effect from correcting rumors was not found if political leaders themselves dispelled the rumor. While being shown a Tweet by ex-prime minister Imran Khan lowered support for vigilantism in Pakistan, the same result was not found when respondents in India were shown a similar Tweet by PM Modi calling for calm after a cow killing.
“This means that even in societies predisposed towards distrusting minorities, correcting rumors about the outgroup in question diminishes support for calls for violence against them and raises support for punishing those who are quick to use violence as a reaction.”Indeed, Badrinathan and co-authors spend a lot of time looking specifically at the results of their experiment on the rumor about cow killings by Muslims in India because these false stories have generated so much controversy and violence in recent years. They find that, unfortunately, this is the only rumor where the correction to the misinformation does not have the positive effect of lowering support for vigilante violence. This suggests that some topics are so sensitive and widely believed that neutral presentations of conflicting information cannot sway individuals’ opinions on vigilante violence as a response. The evidence that correcting rumors can sway individuals’ beliefs across a wide range of topics and in two highly-divided societies does provide hope that misinformation can be combated and truth believed over falsity.
The authors also discover that correcting false rumors increases support for punishing the vigilantes, and that prior levels of trust in the accused outgroup does not influence the treatment’s effect on lower support for vigilantism. This means that even in societies predisposed towards distrusting minorities, correcting rumors about the outgroup in question diminishes support for calls for violence against them and raises support for punishing those who are quick to use violence as a reaction. As concerns about outgroup violence persist in these uncertain times, there is solace in understanding that rumors can be corrected and initial feelings of support for violence in reaction calmed.
- Sienna Nordquist is a 3rd year PhD Student in Social and Political Science at Bocconi University, Italy. She is also a visiting researcher at the WZB’s Transformations of Democracy Unit in Berlin, Germany. Originally from the US, Sienna was a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar at Emory University, received her Master’s degree from the LSE’s European Institute, and has been a Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
- BADRINATHAN, SUMITRA, SIMON CHAUCHARD, and NILOUFER SIDDIQUI. 2024. “Misinformation and Support for Vigilantism: An Experiment in India and Pakistan.” American Political Science Review, 1–19.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.