Richard Hanania likes to emphasize how right-wingers (in the USA) are more accepting of lying, pointing to grievous examples from Trump, Musk, the usual scams and low quality ads on right-wing websites. A recent example:
Very good piece that gets to the central question at the heart of my work. The left is an epistemologically superior position. The fact that the right is filled with dummies and liars has to be taken seriously when thinking about who is correct on substantive issues.
On Musk:
A liar under normal circumstances would try to hide the fact that he’s lying. Musk, in contrast, is something much worse. He’s a man who has contempt for the entire concept of truth, and doesn’t care if the world knows it, as he poisons the public square. Being caught lying doesn’t embarrass him, since he is not trying to win over anyone who is independent minded and honest. Similarly, Grok will cheerfully tell you, accurately, that Musk is the biggest source of misinformation on X. Presumably, Xi Jinping censors Chinese AI models because in CCP circles being known as a transparent liar reduces one’s status, but this is clearly not true on the American right.
And so on. Because of this kind of take, and the conflict with traditional conservative values emphasizing honesty as a moral value, I decided to run a poll on my readers:
If you squint, you can maybe see a pattern. It is however not impressive statistically speaking:
> prop.test(contingency_table)
2-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction
data: contingency_table
X-squared = 2.4947, df = 1, p-value = 0.1142
alternative hypothesis: two.sided
95 percent confidence interval:
-0.01652497 0.10901764
sample estimates:
prop 1 prop 2
0.8847557 0.8385093
The p-value was trending around the bad zone (around 5%), but ultimately ended up at 0.11 with an inconclusive ‘advantage’ to the right-wingers. It should be kept in mind here that polling readers on my Twitter gives a big selection bias, but it is unclear why this bias should favor right-wingers when it comes to attitudes to lying.
In any case, we can perhaps find some more solid results in the scientific literature, so I looked around a bit. Sadly, it is difficult to find much of use. One approach is the HEXACO personality inventory, a 6-factor alternative to the usual big 5 (OCEAN). The dimensions are a bit different, but the main difference is that an honesty-humility dimension is added. So what does this show with regards to political ideology? First study:
We aimed at replicating and extending recent findings about the relationships between the specific aspects entailed by Honesty–Humility and Openness to Experience and ideological attitudes. Study 1 (N = 820) indicated that Openness-Curiosity, not Openness-Cultural, was uniquely associated with Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and that Humility, not Honesty, was uniquely related to Social Dominance Orientation. Divergent effects on RWA were identified for Honesty (positive) and Humility (negative). Study 2 (N = 586) replicated further these results and investigated the moderating role of interest in politics, and the mediating role of Need for Closure in shaping the pattern of associations. Openness-Curiosity and Humility were related to ideological attitudes mostly in a direct way, and these associations were strengthened by interest in politics.
The study is somewhat unsatisfactory because the measure of conservatism is the right-wing authoritarianism scale (lots of problems), not a more typical left-right scale.
I found a study of Swedish students:
The measure of liberal values was modern, asking about 2 woke topics as well as economics. They used a 3-way breakdown of honesty-humility with questions like:
The items were presented with a 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree). Low values indicate the negative side of the facet. Example statements for each of the four facets were: I pretend to be more than I am (Sincerity), I would take things that are not mine (Fairness), I love luxury (Greed-avoidance), and I think I am better than other people (Modesty). An example of a removed negation among these statements was: I don’t love luxury.
Thus, we are interested mainly in the sincerity aspect, which shows correlations of 0.10 to 0.20 with leftism.
These results concern people’s own values, but what Hanania is getting at is whether there’s a difference in tolerance of lying by elites, such as politicians. I found a study that directly tested this: Is there an ideological asymmetry in the moral approval of spreading misinformation by politicians?:
We investigated the relationship between ideology and moral (dis)approval of spreading misinformation by politicians. In experiment 1 (N = 254), higher scores on Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) were positively related to tolerance of politicians lying by commission, paltering, and lying by omission. Also, republicans were more tolerant towards politicians lying by commission and paltering than democrats. Experiment 2 (N = 395) replicated these results, and examined partisan bias. Democrats (but not republicans) showed a partisan bias in tolerance of lying by commission, whereas republicans (but not democrats) showed a partisan bias in tolerance of paltering. In both experiments, RWA and SDO mediated the relationships between political party and approval of spreading misinformation. These results suggest that right-wing individuals are more tolerant to the spreading of misinformation by politicians, although it should be noted that overall levels of approval were relatively low.
The study bears out his observations in that for each type of ‘lying’, Republicans were more tolerant than Democrats. The sample was from MTurk.
There doesn’t seem to be any replications of this study.
Summary
- A poll of my own readers about whether lying is good or not suggested little partisan difference, and if anything, right-wingers were less tolerant of lying.
- An Italian study using the HEXACO honesty-humility subscales suggested right-wing authoritarianism was positively predicted by honesty, but negatively by humility.
- A Swedish student study found that left-wing values were related to sincerity.
- An American study found that Republicans are more tolerant of lying in politicians than Democrats.
- The latter study is the most relevant, so Hanania is right, at least about the American right.
