ABSTRACT The debate around political misinformation is gaining increasing relevance among the general and academic audience. If a large body of work is devoted to understanding the mechanisms of diffusion of inaccurate/false news contents (especially on social media), few studies have focused on the individual mechanisms by which people believe in those news. We look at the interplay between two mechanisms: partisan motivated reasoning and political sophistication. While previous literature suggests that political sophisticates are more affected by motivated reasoning, we hypothesize that in the case of character-related misinformation the opposite is true. By using an on-line survey experiment administered to a sample of Italian citizens, we compare the perceived plausibility of real and inaccurate news contents consistent with different political leanings. Our results show that people tend to perceive all partisan-consistent news as more plausible, but political sophisticates are better able to tell real from false news. We conclude that while political information is generally affected by motivated reasoning, political sophistication can effectively reduce citizens’ chances to fall for false information.

中文翻译：

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政治复杂性和动机推理对错误信息的影响

摘要围绕政治错误信息的辩论在普通观众和学术观众中越来越重要。如果大量工作致力于了解不准确/虚假新闻内容的传播机制（尤其是在社交媒体上），那么很少有研究关注人们相信这些新闻的个体机制。我们着眼于两种机制之间的相互作用：党派动机推理和政治复杂性。虽然以前的文献表明政治老手更容易受到动机推理的影响，但我们假设在与人物相关的错误信息的情况下，情况恰恰相反。通过使用对意大利公民样本进行的在线调查实验，我们比较了与不同政治倾向一致的真实和不准确的新闻内容的感知合理性。我们的结果表明，人们倾向于认为所有党派一致的新闻更可信，但政治老手更能分辨真假新闻。我们得出的结论是，虽然政治信息通常受到动机推理的影响，但政治复杂性可以有效地减少公民陷入虚假信息的机会。