True, false, or in between? Examining the role of political identity in judging news statements of varying degrees of truthfulness

Research conducted to understand belief in misinformation often dichotomizes stimuli into true and false information. Yet news in the real world exists in varying shades of truthfulness. In three studies (N = 4046), we presented participants with statements from Politifact.com that were selected to be liberal- or conservative-leaning and varied in truthfulness, rated by Politifact on a scale from True to Pants on Fire (72 total statements tested). Political conservatism was positively associated with believing conservative-friendly statements (ORs = 1.26 to 1.41) and disbelieving liberal-friendly statements (ORs = 0.75 to 0.87), a pattern which persisted across the scale of statement truthfulness. Additional analyses did not reveal consistent strong predictors of belief in politically congenial or uncongenial statements, though ideological extremity tended to be associated with belief in congenial statements and disbelief in uncongenial ones. These real-world claims, across a range of truthfulness, help illustrate patterns of partisan (mis)information belief.