Misinformation and Support for Vigilantism: An Experiment in India and Pakistan

The Moynihan Institute and the program for Comparative Politics/International Relations is proud to host Niloufer Siddiqui from SUNY Albany. 

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 accounts often link anti-minority vigilantism to misinformation, the precise link between 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 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.