Researchers across many disciplines seek to understand how misinformation spreads with a view toward limiting its impact. One important question in this research is how people determine whether a given piece of news is real or fake. In the current article, we discuss the value of signal detection theory (SDT) in disentangling two distinct aspects in the identification of fake news: (a) ability to accurately distinguish between real news and fake news and (b) response biases to judge news as real or fake regardless of news veracity. The value of SDT for understanding the determinants of fake-news beliefs is illustrated with reanalyses of existing data sets, providing more nuanced insights into how partisan bias, cognitive reflection, and prior exposure influence the identification of fake news. Implications of SDT for the use of source-related information in the identification of fake news, interventions to improve people’s skills in detecting fake news, and the debunking of misinformation are discussed.

As we explain in this chapter, even this example could be interpreted in terms of dissonance, such that scientists may experience aversive feelings when they are exposed to evidence that contradicts their theoretical views. From this perspective, the resolution of inconsistency via reinterpretation of theoretical concepts could be regarded as a strategy to reduce dissonance (cf. Quine & Ullian, 1978).

Identity fusion refers to a visceral sense of oneness with an ingroup. For fused individuals, group membership is not a means to an end (e.g., a positive social identity). Rather, membership is an all-absorbing goal in itself; little other than the group matters. Group membership is also seen as enduring, sustained by chronically activated psychological structures as well as features of the context. Fellow group members are likewise seen as permanent members of the group, as they are members of the ingroup "family". And just as family members are compelled to make extreme sacrifices for their family, so too are highly fused individuals -including even the ultimate sacrifice. These efforts to protect the ingroup can have negative consequences when, for example, people become strongly fused to groups that are devoted to extreme, anti-social behaviors. In such instances, it may be prudent to encourage "defusion" from the group, but the emotional investment associated with fusion may thwart such efforts. We discuss the implications of these and related considerations.During WWII, four members of a B-17 bomber crew formed a pact that they would never abandon one another no matter how dire the situation. Not long afterwards, their plane was shelled and went into a terminal dive. The pilot ordered everyone to parachute to safety. As the crewmen donned their parachutes, they discovered that one member of the pact (the ball-turret gunner) was trapped, and there was no time to release him. Realizing this, the other three pact members aborted their plans to parachute to safety, remaining on the plane to await their fiery deaths. (From S. Junger's War)

The current chapter reviews the findings of an ongoing research program suggesting that changes in attitudes can be limited to the context in which counterattitudinal information was learned. The reviewed findings indicate that, although counterattitudinal information may effectively influence evaluations in the context in which this information was learned, previously formed attitudes may continue to influence evaluations in any other context. According to the representational theory of contextualized attitude change, such patterns of contextual renewal occur because exposure to expectancy-violating information enhances attention to context, which leads to an integration of the context into the representation of expectancy-violating counterattitudinal information. The chapter reviews research that (a) tested novel predictions derived from the representational theory of contextualized attitude change, (b) explored the nature of contextualized representations, and (c) investigated the boundary conditions of contextualized attitude change. Theoretical challenges, future directions, and implications for basic and applied research are discussed.

Research on implicit evaluation has yielded mixed results, with some studies suggesting that implicit evaluations are relatively resistant to change and others showing that implicit evaluations can change rapidly in response to new information. To reconcile these findings, it has been suggested that changes in implicit evaluations can be limited to the context in which counterattitudinal information was acquired. The current research expands on evidence for such context-dependent changes by investigating whether two cases of rapid change—updating caused by a reinterpretation of earlier information and by exposure to diagnostic information—generalize across contexts or, instead, are limited to the context in which the qualifying information was acquired. Two experiments found that both reinterpretation of earlier information and diagnostic counterattitudinal information led to changes in implicit evaluations that generalized across contexts. Implications for the malleability of implicit evaluations and context-dependent changes in implicit evaluations are discussed.