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 re-think 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 contrast – and inconsistent with the Motivated System 2 Reasoning account – we 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.

Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention

“…The present studies also add to the literature on reasoning and truth discernment. While much of the discussion around fake news has focused on political ideology and partisan identity (Beck, 2017;Kahan, 2017;Taub, 2017;Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018), our data are more consistent with recent studies on political misinformation that provide both correlational (Pennycook & Rand, 2019b) (including data from Twitter sharing; Mosleh, Pennycook, Arechar, & Rand, 2020) and experimental (Bago, Rand, & Pennycook, 2019) evidence for an important role of analytic cognitive style. That is, our data suggest that an important contributor to lack of truth discernment for health misinformation is the type of intuitive or emotional thinking that has been associated with conspiratorial beliefs (Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014;Vitriol & Marsh, 2018) and superstition (Elk, 2013;Lindeman & Svedholm, 2012;Risen, 2015).…”

Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online

“…Our results challenge this account. We find little evidence of greater belief in politically congenial false headlines in Study 1 (consistent with other recent work on belief in fake news 16,52,57 ). Even more importantly, we find that encouraging an accuracy focus does not make people more favorable toward politically congenial headlines, as would be predicted by prominent theories of identity protective cognition 11,19,47 .…”

“…Another issue for future work is more precisely identifying people's state of belief when not reflecting on accuracy: Is it that people hold no particular belief one way or the other, or that they tend to assume content is true by default 59 ? Although our results do not differentiate between these possibilities, prior work suggesting that intuitive processes support belief in false headlines 16,57 lends some credence to the latter possibility. Similarly, future work should investigate why most people think it is important to only share accuracy content 60 differentiating, for example, between an internalized desire for accuracy versus reputation-based concerns.…”

Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing

“…As we noted above, people who lack the motivation to generate accurate responses may rely more on intuitive responses and believe or share misinformation (Pennycook & Rand, 2019). One recent study (Bago et al., 2020) showed that encouraging people to deliberate about whether a headline is true or false can improve accuracy in detecting fake news. Participants were required to give fast intuitive responses to a series of headlines, and then subsequently given an opportunity to rethink their responses, free from a time constraint (thus permitting more deliberation).…”