@article{ref1,
title="Asking people to explain complex policies does not increase political moderation: three preregistered failures to closely replicate Fernbach, Rogers, Fox, and Sloman's (2013) findings",
journal="Psychological science",
year="2021",
author="Crawford, Jarret T. and Ruscio, John",
volume="ePub",
number="ePub",
pages="ePub-ePub",
abstract="Fernbach et al. (2013) found that political extremism and partisan in-group favoritism can be reduced by asking people to provide mechanistic explanations for complex policies, thus making their lack of procedural-policy knowledge salient. Given the practical importance of these findings, we conducted two preregistered close replications of Fernbach et al.'s Experiment 2 (Replication 1a: N = 306; Replication 1b: N = 405) and preregistered close and conceptual replications of Fernbach et al.'s Experiment 3 (Replication 2: N = 343). None of the key effects were statistically significant, and only one survived a small-telescopes analysis. Although participants reported less policy understanding after providing mechanistic policy explanations, policy-position extremity and in-group favoritism were unaffected. That said, well-established findings that providing justifications for prior beliefs strengthens those beliefs, and well-established findings of in-group favoritism, were replicated. These findings suggest that providing mechanistic explanations increases people's recognition of their ignorance but is unlikely to increase their political moderation, at least under these conditions.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0956-7976",
doi="10.1177/0956797620972367",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797620972367"
}