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Abstract
Political misperceptions pose a serious threat to democracy, making it imperative to understand how to correct such false beliefs. Online ratings could play an important role in this process. Research on bandwagon effects suggests that favorable online ratings should help make corrections more persuasive by fostering trust in such messages. The assumption that online ratings are uniformly persuasive is, however, overly simplistic. I argue that online ratings will not always promote acceptance of corrections. In what I term the social affirmation heuristic, I hypothesize that people will only trust ratings of factual corrections that affirm what they already believe, and vice versa. I further predict that rating trust will influence subsequent trust in corrections. Taken together, this means that belief discrepant ratings can have boomerang effects. Instead of eliciting the bandwagon effects described above, favorable ratings promote distrust of belief discrepant corrections. It is, however, possible for belief uncertainty and de-biasing messages to limit these boomerang effects by reducing reliance on the social affirmation heuristic. I expect these predictions to hold for various kinds of ratings, including both star ratings, which indicate rater favorability toward content, and Likes, which indicate the number of raters who see value in the content.
This dissertation uses two studies to test these ideas. The first study uses data from an online experiment conducted with convenience sample of 847 participants. The data for the second study come from a nationally representative sample of 500 participants. With the exception of the hypothesis that belief confidence affects rating trust, all hypotheses received robust support in the context of star ratings. Implications of these findings are discussed.
