Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief and dissemination of true and false news

Pereira, Andréa Franco; Harris, Elizabeth Ann; Bavel, Jay Joseph Van

doi:10.31234/osf.io/7vc5d

Cited by 47 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(68 reference statements)

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“…In these cases, conspiracy theory beliefs psychologically greatly overlap with other kinds of false beliefs and can be explained by affiliated psychological models. For instance, in line with the identity-based model of political beliefs [46**], social identity motives increased participants' likelihood to believe in fake news that represented their own political party as moral [47]. Likewise, participants were more likely to believe conspiracy theories that aligned with their party's political stances and vilified the opposite party [39][40][41]48,49,50].…”

Section: Content Drawn Motives: Social Identity Motivesmentioning

confidence: 91%

The dark side of social movements: social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories

Sternisko

Cichocka

Bavel

2020

Current Opinion in Psychology

137

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CitationSternisko, A., Cichocka, A. & Van Bavel, J. J. (in press). The dark side of social movements: Social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories. Current Opinion in Psychology. AcknowledgementsWe thank members of the Social Identity and Morality Lab for valuable feedback on a previous version of this article. We thank our research assistants Sahar Hafezi and Akiva Thalheim for their help with literature research and proofreading the article. AbstractSocial change does not always equal social progress--there is a dark side of social movements.We discuss conspiracy theory beliefs -beliefs that a powerful group of people are secretly working towards a malicious goal-as one contributor to destructive social movements. Research has linked conspiracy theory beliefs to anti-democratic attitudes, prejudice and non-normative political behavior. We propose a framework to understand the motivational processes behind conspiracy theories and associated social identities and collective action. We argue that conspiracy theories comprise at least two components -content and qualities-that appeal to people differently based on their motivations. Social identity motives draw people foremost to contents of conspiracy theories while uniqueness motives draw people to qualities of conspiracy

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Section: Content Drawn Motives: Social Identity Motivesmentioning

confidence: 91%

The dark side of social movements: social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories

Sternisko

Cichocka

Bavel

2020

Current Opinion in Psychology

137

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…It would therefore be desirable to be able to investigate social media sharing in more traditional lab or online survey settings, rather than on-platform-and psychologists are increasingly engaging in such studies. For example, studies on fake news and misinformation have presented individuals with news headlines and asked online participants to indicate if they would be willing to share them on social media [12][13][14][15][16]. It is unclear, however, whether responses to such 'hypothetical' self-report social media sharing questions reliably tracks actual behavior online.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-reported willingness to share political news articles in online surveys correlates with actual sharing on Twitter

Mosleh¹,

Pennycook²,

Rand³

2020

PLoS ONE

129

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There is an increasing imperative for psychologists and other behavioral scientists to understand how people behave on social media. However, it is often very difficult to execute experimental research on actual social media platforms, or to link survey responses to online behavior in order to perform correlational analyses. Thus, there is a natural desire to use selfreported behavioral intentions in standard survey studies to gain insight into online behavior. But are such hypothetical responses hopelessly disconnected from actual sharing decisions? Or are online survey samples via sources such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) so different from the average social media user that the survey responses of one group give little insight into the on-platform behavior of the other? Here we investigate these issues by examining 67 pieces of political news content. We evaluate whether there is a meaningful relationship between (i) the level of sharing (tweets and retweets) of a given piece of content on Twitter, and (ii) the extent to which individuals (total N = 993) in online surveys on MTurk reported being willing to share that same piece of content. We found that the same news headlines that were more likely to be hypothetically shared on MTurk were also shared more frequently by Twitter users, r = .44. For example, across the observed range of MTurk sharing fractions, a 20 percentage point increase in the fraction of MTurk participants who reported being willing to share a news headline on social media was associated with 10x as many actual shares on Twitter. We also found that the correlation between sharing and various features of the headline was similar using both MTurk and Twitter data. These findings suggest that self-reported sharing intentions collected in online surveys are likely to provide some meaningful insight into what content would actually be shared on social media.

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“…These findings have important implications for theories of partisan bias, political psychology, and motivated reasoning. It has been variously argued that partisan identity disrupts information processing in substantive waysmost notably, in this context, by leading people to share or believe politically congenial fake news and misinformation online 11,12,55,56 . Our results challenge this account.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online

Pennycook¹,

Epstein²,

Mosleh³

et al. 2019

Preprint

152

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The spread of false and misleading news content on social media is of great societal concern. Why do people share such content, and what can be done about it? In a first survey experiment (N=1,015), we demonstrate a disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions: even though true headlines are rated as much more accurate than false headlines, headline veracity has little impact on sharing. Although this may seem to indicate that people share inaccurate content because they care more about furthering their political agenda than they care about truth, we propose an alternative attentional account: Most people do not want to spread misinformation, but the social media context focuses their attention on factors other than truth and accuracy. Indeed, when directly asked, most participants say it is important to only share news that is accurate. Accordingly, across four survey experiments (total N=3,485) and a digital field experiment on Twitter in which we messaged users who had previously shared news from websites known for publishing misleading content (N=5,379), we find that inducing people to think about the concept of accuracy increases the quality of the news they subsequently share. Together, these results challenge the narrative that people no longer care about accuracy. Instead, the results support our inattention-based account wherein people fail to implement their preference for accuracy due to attentional constraints. Furthermore, our research provides evidence for scalable anti-misinformation interventions that are easily implementable by social media platforms.

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Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief and dissemination of true and false news

Cited by 47 publications

References 49 publications

The dark side of social movements: social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories

The dark side of social movements: social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories

Self-reported willingness to share political news articles in online surveys correlates with actual sharing on Twitter

Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online

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