Critical Thinking Via Storytelling: Theory and Social Media Experiment

In a stylized voting model, we establish that increasing the share of critical thinkers – individuals who are aware of the ambivalent nature of a certain issue – in the population increases the efficiency of surveys (elections) but might increase surveys’ bias. In an incentivized online social media experiment on a representative US population (N = 706), we show that different digital storytelling formats – different designs to present the same set of facts – affect the intensity at which individuals become critical thinkers. Intermediate-length designs (Facebook posts) are most effective at triggering individuals into critical thinking. Individuals with a high need for cognition mostly drive the differential effects of the treatments.