Aging in an Era of Fake News

Brashier, Nadia M.; Schacter, Daniel L.

doi:10.1177/0963721420915872

Cited by 233 publications

(216 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…and that older viewers were heavier consumers than younger ones" (p. 4). Brashier and Schacter (2020) argued "that cognitive declines alone cannot explain older adults' engagement with fake news" (p. 321), but that gaps in digital literacy and social motives may play a bigger role. The role of analytic reasoning and deliberation may also offer hints as to who is particularly susceptible to false information.…”

Section: Floodingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools

Kozyreva

Lewandowsky

Hertwig

2020

Psychol Sci Public Interest

222

118

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The Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous and indispensable digital environment in which people communicate, seek information, and make decisions. Despite offering various benefits, online environments are also replete with smart, highly adaptive choice architectures designed primarily to maximize commercial interests, capture and sustain users’ attention, monetize user data, and predict and influence future behavior. This online landscape holds multiple negative consequences for society, such as a decline in human autonomy, rising incivility in online conversation, the facilitation of political extremism, and the spread of disinformation. Benevolent choice architects working with regulators may curb the worst excesses of manipulative choice architectures, yet the strategic advantages, resources, and data remain with commercial players. One way to address some of this imbalance is with interventions that empower Internet users to gain some control over their digital environments, in part by boosting their information literacy and their cognitive resistance to manipulation. Our goal is to present a conceptual map of interventions that are based on insights from psychological science. We begin by systematically outlining how online and offline environments differ despite being increasingly inextricable. We then identify four major types of challenges that users encounter in online environments: persuasive and manipulative choice architectures, AI-assisted information architectures, false and misleading information, and distracting environments. Next, we turn to how psychological science can inform interventions to counteract these challenges of the digital world. After distinguishing among three types of behavioral and cognitive interventions—nudges, technocognition, and boosts—we focus on boosts, of which we identify two main groups: (a) those aimed at enhancing people’s agency in their digital environments (e.g., self-nudging, deliberate ignorance) and (b) those aimed at boosting competencies of reasoning and resilience to manipulation (e.g., simple decision aids, inoculation). These cognitive tools are designed to foster the civility of online discourse and protect reason and human autonomy against manipulative choice architectures, attention-grabbing techniques, and the spread of false information.

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Section: Floodingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools

Kozyreva

Lewandowsky

Hertwig

2020

Psychol Sci Public Interest

222

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Given limited digital media literacy (Schreurs, Quan-Haase, & Martin, 2017;Seifert, Cotten, & Xie, 2020), impairments in decision-making processes (Ebner, Pehlivanoglu, Polk, Turner, & Spreng, in press;Spreng, Ebner, Levin, & Turner, 2020), and changes in socioemotional functioning (Ebner & Fischer, 2014;Gutchess & Samanez-Larkin, 2019), older adults may be particularly susceptible to fake news (Brashier & Schacter, 2020;Grinberg, Joseph, Friedland, Swire-Thompson, & Lazer, 2019). In fact, recent statistics showed that older adults were the demographic that shared the most fake news during the 2016 U.S. election on platforms such as Twitter (Grinberg et al, 2019) and Facebook (Guess, Nagler, & Tucker, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging in an “infodemic”: The role of cognition, affect, and experience on news veracity detection during the COVID-19 pandemic

Pehlivanoglu¹,

Lin²,

Joseph³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Increasing misinformation spread, including related to COVID-19, is concerning and poses a particular threat to older adults given their enhanced subjective risk perception, disease-related risk, and impaired decision making. To date, psychological factors contributing to news veracity detection in aging are not well understood. This study determined the role of (i) analytical reasoning; (ii) mood; and (iii) news consumption on real and fake news detection among older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic; and examined (iv) the extent to which news content moderated these associations. Participants were randomly assigned to view either COVID-related (N = 119) or non-COVID (N = 123) news articles, followed by analytical reasoning, mood, and news consumption measures. Accuracy for non-COVID fake news was higher than accuracy for non-COVID real news; with this effect not present for COVID-related news. Further, higher analytical reasoning (but not mood or media consumption) was associated with greater non-COVID fake news accuracy, while accuracy for non-COVID real news, or COVID-related real and fake news, did not vary by analytical reasoning ability. Uniquely extending previous work into aging, the novel findings generated here are discussed in the context of psychological mechanisms underlying news veracity detection and related decision-making processes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“…Vice versa, when it comes to documented antecedents of fake news sharing, such as age (panel C2) and partisan identity (panels D2 and E2), we find no corresponding asymmetries in truth discernment. Remarkably, our oldest participants exhibit just as much skill in discerning between fake and real news as our youngest participants (panel C1) (see also Brashier and Schacter 2020). Similarly, partisanship is a strong correlate of sharing partisan "fake news" both among Democrats (D2) and Republicans (E2).…”

Section: E2mentioning

confidence: 62%

"Fact-checking" videos reduce belief in misinformation and improve the quality of news shared on Twitter

A¹,

Osmundsen²,

Shr³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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"Fake news" are widely acknowledged as an important challenge for Western democracies. Yet, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to measuring the effects of various counter-strategies. We address this void by running a pre-registered field experiment analyzing the causal effects of popular fact-checking videos on both believing and sharing fake news among Twitter users (N = 1,600). We find that the videos improve truth discernment ability as measured by performance in a fake news quiz immediately after exposure. However, the videos have not reduced sharing links from verified "fake news" websites on Twitter in the weeks following the exposure. Indeed, we find no relationship between truth discernment ability and fake news sharing. These results imply that the development of effective interventions should be based on a nuanced view of the distinct psychological motivations of sharing and believing "fake news".

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Aging in an Era of Fake News

Cited by 233 publications

References 45 publications

Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools

Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools

Aging in an “infodemic”: The role of cognition, affect, and experience on news veracity detection during the COVID-19 pandemic

"Fact-checking" videos reduce belief in misinformation and improve the quality of news shared on Twitter

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