Modeling political information transmission as a game of telephone

Many individuals learn about politics from other people instead of directly from the media. While this could be a good way to reduce information costs, highly controlled lab experiments reveal that the information exchanged can be biased. These important lab experiments are so controlled, however, that they ignore the complexities of language inherent in real-world information transmission. In an effort to improve our understanding of how political information changes as it propagates from the media to one person to another, I conduct a novel online experiment in which I track information diffusion through individuals in communication chains. I then use content analysis to examine how the information is actually changing, finding that the amount of political information communicated decreases as the number of people in the chain increases. Furthermore, the information is increasingly distorted as the length of the chain increases.