Who sees which political falsehoods as more acceptable and why: A new look at in-group loyalty and trustworthiness

Many politicians-even those who occupy some of the most powerful offices in the world-lie. Five studies examined how conservative and liberal Americans responded to media reports of politicians' falsehoods-that is, flagged falsehoods (FFs). Even accounting for partisan biases in how much participants dismissed such reports as fake news and assumed that such lies were unintentional, we consistently observed partisan evaluations in how much FFs were seen as justifiable: Republicans and Democrats alike saw their own party's FFs as more acceptable (Studies 1-4). This charitability did not reflect unconditional in-group favoritism. Instead, it was strongest for policy FFs-those meant to advance a party's explicit agenda-as opposed to personal FFs about a politician's past (Study 2) or electoral FFs that strayed from parties' explicit goals by aiming to disenfranchise legally eligible voters (Study 4). Although FFs can undermine general trustworthiness in the eyes of both in-group and out-group members, policy FFs in particular signal partisan trustworthiness (Studies 3-5)-the belief that a politician can be trusted by their own political side and not by the other. For likeminded partisans, such partisan trustworthiness predicted not only the perceived acceptability of FFs, but also perceptions of the politician as a more prototypically moral actor, even outside of the political sphere. These findings validate the importance of our dual conception of trustworthiness in intergroup contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).