Misinformation and support for vigilantism: An experiment in India and Pakistan

• Department of Political and Social Sciences
• Ukraine

In the framework of the EUI Political Behaviour Colloquium, this seminar features a presentation by Simon Chauchard, Associate Professor at University Carlos III Madrid & at Instituto Carlos III - Juan March.

Vigilante violence, often targeting religious and sectarian minorities, has taken the lives of hundreds of people in India and Pakistan in recent years. While journalistic and scholarly accounts often link such violence to underlying misinformation, the precise link between belief in misinformation and support for extralegal violence remains unidentified. We field simultaneous in-person experiments in Punjab, Pakistan, and Uttar Pradesh, India, regions where lynchings of minority citizens have been preceded by misinformation. We test whether reducing the credibility of misinformation decreases support for vigilantism. We also test the effect of two additional variables—state positionality and elite rhetoric—which existing literature has highlighted as predictive of support for vigilantism. We find that decreasing the credibility of misinformation significantly reduces support for vigilantism in both countries and that this effect is not attenuated by prior intolerance towards outgroups. In contrast, we find that information about state and elite positionality does little to change attitudes towards vigilantism. Our study provides hopeful evidence that support for vigilantism can be reduced through the dissemination of credible information in times of crises.

The paper is co-authored with: Sumitra Badrinathan, Assistant Professor at American University, and Niloufer Siddiqui, Assistant Professor at University at Albany-SUNY.