Associative Inference Can Increase People’s Susceptibility to Misinformation

Abstract

Associative inference is an adaptive, constructive process of memory that allows people to link related information to make novel connections. We conducted three online human-subjects experiments investigating participants’ susceptibility to associatively inferred misinformation and its interaction with their cognitive ability and how news articles were presented. In each experiment, participants completed recognition and perceived accuracy rating tasks for the snippets of news articles in a tweet format across two phases. At Phase 1, participants viewed real news only. At Phase 2, participants viewed both real and fake news. Critically, we varied whether the fake news at Phase 2 was inferred from (i.e., associative inference), associated with (i.e., association only), or irrelevant to (i.e., control) the corresponding real news pairs at Phase 1. Both recognition and perceived accuracy results showed that participants in the associative inference condition were more susceptible to fake news than those in the other conditions. Furthermore, hashtags embedded within the tweets made the obtained effects evident only for the participants of higher cognitive ability. Our findings reveal that associative inference can be a basis for individuals’ susceptibility to misinformation, especially for those of higher cognitive ability. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for understanding and mitigating misinformation on social media platforms.

“Fact-checking” fact checkers: A data-driven approach

“…The spread of misinformation can have severe negative impacts on individuals and society, such as COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy (Garett & Young, 2021) or election results manipulation (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). Furthermore, individuals characterized as 'lazy' are not the only ones susceptible to misinformation (Pennycook & Rand, 2019); specific types of misinformation, such as associatively inferred misinformation, can make individuals with higher cognitive ability levels even more susceptible (Lee et al, 2020(Lee et al, , 2023Xiong et al, 2023). Fact-checking organizations, often known as fact checkers, are instrumental in identifying and debunking misinformation.…”