Abstract:
When people choose how to communicate, they must consider whether their audience will be biased in interpreting their messages. This paper experimentally examines how politically-motivated reasoning affects information transmission. Senders are randomly matched with receivers whose political parties' stances happen to be aligned or misaligned with a truthful statement, and either face incentives to be rated as truthful or face no incentives. Incentives for senders to be rated as truthful backfire, causing senders to be less truthful. Backfiring occurs because incentivized senders tailor false messages to better align with receivers' politically-motivated beliefs. Receivers are naive to these incentives' adverse effects.