Fake news, fast and slow: Deliberation reduces belief in false (but not true) news headlines.

Abstract

What role does deliberation play in susceptibility to political misinformation and "fake news"? The "Motivated System 2 Reasoning" account posits that deliberation causes people to fall for fake news because reasoning facilitates identity-protective cognition and is therefore used to rationalize content that is consistent with one's political ideology. The classical account of reasoning instead posits that people ineffectively discern between true and false news headlines when they fail to deliberate (and instead rely on intuition). To distinguish between these competing accounts, we investigated the causal effect of reasoning on media truth discernment using a two-response paradigm. Participants (N= 1635 MTurkers) were presented with a series of headlines. For each, they were first asked to give an initial, intuitive response under time pressure and concurrent working memory load. They were then given an opportunity to rethink their response with no constraints, thereby permitting more deliberation. We also compared these responses to a (deliberative) one-response baseline condition where participants made a single choice with no constraints. Consistent with the classical account, we found that deliberation corrected intuitive mistakes: subjects believed false headlines (but not true headlines) more in initial responses than in either final responses or the unconstrained 1-response baseline. In contrastand inconsistent with the Motivated System 2 Reasoning accountwe found that political polarization was equivalent across responses. Our data suggest that, in the context of fake news, deliberation facilitates accurate belief formation and not partisan bias.

Beyond “fake news”: Analytic thinking and the detection of false and hyperpartisan news headlines

“…This supports the classical reasoning account because it indicates that people who engage in more (and/or better) reasoning are more likely to accurately reject false partisan content and, therefore, they were no more likely (and, in fact, were less likely) to engage in politically motivated System 2 reasoning. Furthermore, and also consistent with the classical reasoning account, impeding deliberation with cognitive load and time pressure (Bago et al, 2020), or an instruction to rely on emotion (Martel et al, 2019), reduced discernment by increasing belief in fake news headlinesregardless of the headlines' political concordance.…”

“…When applied to fake and hyperpartisan news content, the implication of this perspective is straightforward: Engaging in Type 2 (analytic) processing supports the accurate rejection of misleading content and help individuals discern between what is true and false. By this accountwhich we will refer to here as the "classical reasoning account" -misleading news is believed when people fail to sufficiently engage deliberative (Type 2) reasoning processes (Bago, Rand, & Pennycook, 2020;Pennycook & Rand, 2019b). Furthermore, the reason why misleading content is believed relates to its intuitive appeal; content that is highly emotional (Martel, Pennycook, & Rand, 2019) or that provokes moral outrage (Brady, Gantmam, & Van Bavel, 2020;Crockett, 2017) draws people's attention and, since our cognitive system prioritizes miserly processing (Fisk & Taylor, 1984;Stanovich, 2004), many individuals fail to effectively stop and reflect on their faulty intuitions.…”

Misinformation more likely to use non-specific authority references: Twitter analysis of two COVID-19 myths

“…Users should view general attributions to authority references as a guideline for raising their suspicion of the accuracy of the tweet, as misinformation tweets were more likely to include ambiguous, non-specific cues to authority references (e.g., "medical professionals", "a nurse friend"). Intentional deliberation can reduce misinformation spread (Bago et al, 2020). To contrast these findings, research should examine the prevalence of non-specific and specific authority appeals in different health contexts.…”

Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world

“…In addition to these motivational factors, a growing literature has explored the role of 'cognition' in susceptibility to misinformation. Overall, a large literature finds that factors such as education [31,32], analytical thinking, numeracy skills, 'bullshit receptivity' and 'intuitive' versus 'reflective' thinking styles (often assessed via the cognitive reflection test) appear to play a consistent and key role in processing misinformation [10,14,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. Following prior research [17], we included numeracy in the current study.…”