The Right, just happens to be in a bit in a slump right now with its anti-science religious activism. "Doing worse"
Garrett & Bond (2021), Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions, Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc...
Sultan et al. (2024), Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409329121?utm_source=...
Rathje et al. (2023), Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information, Nature Human Behaviour. This one emphasizes that misinformation judgments are shaped by both accuracy motives and social/identity motives, which helps explain why partisan gaps are not simply about intelligence or total inability to separate truth from fiction. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_sourc...
Lyons et al. (2021), Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019527118?utm_source=...
Pennycook et al. (2022), Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing online misinformation, Nature Communications. This paper discusses baseline sharing discernment and notes worse baseline discernment among conservatives in the samples they studied, while also showing that simple accuracy prompts can help. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_sourc...
summary is: there are studies showing conservatives, on average, perform worse on certain misinformation/truth-discernment tasks, but the strongest scholarly version of the claim is narrower and more conditional than the popular retelling https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc...