Judgements of Propaganda Near and Far: National Identity and Media Evaluations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Western media often critiques foreign governments for their propaganda efforts while ignoring similar efforts by their own government. We predicted that individuals would demonstrate a similar bias. An experiment with 282 Canadian participants revealed just the opposite: when asked overtly, participants judged a video attributed to their own government to be more like propaganda than identical foreign media. When asked covertly (e.g., about the video's bias), we observed no effect, and national identity was not a moderator for Canadians. In a direct replication, Americans ( N = 457) also judged domestic videos as more like propaganda than foreign ones, whether perceptions of propaganda were measured overtly or covertly. This difference was especially true of those lower and average in national identity, compared to those higher. A follow‐up study demonstrated that Americans ( N = 380) who are left‐leaning are more likely to show this bias against domestic media, compared to those who are centrist or right‐leaning. These studies demonstrate that people can be more critical of their own government's messaging relative to the same messaging by a foreign power, the opposite of holding a self‐serving double standard.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".