Politics interferes with the ability to assess expertise

Learning about someone's political beliefs interferes with a person's ability to assess expertise, as people judge like-minded peers as being more expert in fields completely unrelated to politics, finds a new UCL-led study. In the paper, published in Cognition , the researchers found that people turned to peers with similar political views for help on a shape categorisation task that had nothing to do with politics, instead of seeking help from someone who was doing better at the shape categorisation task but didn't share their political leanings. "Our findings have implications for the spread of false news, for political polarisation and for social divisions. If we are aware of a person's political leanings, for example on social media, we will be more likely to accept their take on a myriad of issues without scrutiny," said the study's senior author, Professor Tali Sharot (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences). The researchers from UCL and Harvard University tasked 97 study participants with categorising geometric shapes based on the shape's features. The participants were told whether their answers were correct and were also shown the answers of four other "co-players" who had completed the same task. The co-players were actually computer algorithms designed to perform the task either extremely well or relatively poorly.