The DOI matches its Crossref record; 47 of the 47 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
MISPERCEPTIONS ABOUT PERCEPTUAL BIAS
Abstract
▪ Abstract Do people assimilate new information in an efficient and unbiased manner—that is, do they update prior beliefs in accordance with Bayes' rule? Or are they selective in the way that they gather and absorb new information? Although many classic studies in political science and psychology contend that people resist discordant information, more recent research has tended to call the selective perception hypothesis into question. We synthesize the literatures on biased assimilation and belief polarization using a formal model that encompasses both Bayesian and biased learning. The analysis reveals (a) the conditions under which these phenomena may be consistent with Bayesian learning, (b) the methodological inadequacy of certain research designs that fail to control for preferences or prior information, and (c) the limited support that exists for the more extreme variants of the selective perception hypothesis.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Festinger, L. (1957) · doi:10.1515/9781503620766 · Cited by 24,241
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
Zaller, J. R. (1992) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511818691 · Cited by 7,785
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
Kenski, H. C., & Zaller, J. R. (1993) · Contemporary Sociology · doi:10.2307/2074664 · Cited by 5,169
Eulau, H. (1960) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s000305540012235x · Cited by 4,722
Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.37.11.2098 · Cited by 4,583
What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters
Brooks, C., Carpini, M. X. D., & Keeter, S. (1997) · Contemporary Sociology · doi:10.2307/2655098 · Cited by 4,437
Perception and Misperception in International Politics
Jervis, R. (2017) · doi:10.1515/9781400885114 · Cited by 3,199
Miller, G. A., & Cantor, N. (1982) · Social Cognition · doi:10.1521/soco.1982.1.1.83 · Cited by 2,816
Comparison of Bayesian and regression approaches to the study of information processing in judgment
Slovic, P., & Lichtenstein, S. (1971) · Organizational Behavior and Human Performance · doi:10.1016/0030-5073(71)90033-x · Cited by 1,819
The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences
Page, B. I., & Shapiro, R. Y. (1992) · University of Chicago Press eBooks · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226644806.001.0001 · Cited by 1,680
Cited by
Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs
Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006) · American Journal of Political Science · doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00214.x · Cited by 4,344
The psychology of self-defense: Self-affirmation theory
Sherman, D. K., & Cohen, G. L. (2006) · Advances in Experimental Social Psychology · doi:10.1016/s0065-2601(06)38004-5 · Cited by 1,614
Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions
Bartels, L. M. (2002) · Political Behavior · doi:10.1023/a:1021226224601 · Cited by 1,468
Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2021.02.007 · Cited by 1,360
The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes’ Steadfast Factual Adherence
Wood, T., & Porter, E. (2019) · Political Behavior · doi:10.1007/s11109-018-9443-y · Cited by 904
Metadata
- Authors
- Gerber, A., & Green, D.
- Venue
- Annual Review of Political Science
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 1999-06
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 189-210
- ISSN
- 1094-2939 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-1577
- OpenAlex
- W2118744644
- Cited by
- 494
- References
- 47
- FWCI
- 2.14
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: MISPERCEPTIONS ABOUT PERCEPTUAL BIAS. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.189
- The paper
- Gerber, A., & Green, D. (1999). MISPERCEPTIONS ABOUT PERCEPTUAL BIAS. Annual Review of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.189
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
