Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news

Abstract

What is the role of emotion in susceptibility to believing fake news? Prior work on the psychology of misinformation has focused primarily on the extent to which reason and deliberation hinder versus help the formation of accurate beliefs. Several studies have suggested that people who engage in more reasoning are less likely to fall for fake news. However, the role of reliance on emotion in belief in fake news remains unclear. To shed light on this issue, we explored the relationship between specific emotions and belief in fake news (Study 1; N = 409). We found that across a wide range of specific emotions, heightened emotionality was predictive of increased belief in fake (but not real) news. Then, in Study 2, we measured and manipulated reliance on emotion versus reason across four experiments (total N = 3884). We found both correlational and causal evidence that reliance on emotion increases belief in fake news: Self-reported use of emotion was positively associated with belief in fake (but not real) news, and inducing reliance on emotion resulted in greater belief in fake (but not real) news stories compared to a control or to inducing reliance on reason. These results shed light on the unique role that emotional processing may play in susceptibility to fake news.

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.…”

“…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. Indeed, it may be that social media is particularly conducive to inattention (Weng, Flammini, Vespignani, & Menczer, 2012) and it may surface social motivations (e.g., maximize getting "likes") that distract from otherwise salient accuracy motivations (Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2020;Pennycook, McPhetres, Zhang, Lu, & Rand, 2020).…”

Rising Above Misinformation or Fake News in Africa: Another Strategy to Control COVID-19 Spread

“…Before connecting COVID-19 related misconceptions and misinformation, it critical for the purposes of scientific interest to provide a deeper insight of the mechanisms that may foster set of beliefs, their acceptance and/or rejection of somewhat false information. By providing deeper insights on the linkages between the concepts, a better understanding could also help guide interventions targeted at reducing incorrect beliefs on COVID-19 (Martel et al, 2019). Using the classical reasoning perspective, reasoning atypically support unearthing the truth of news content and that misconceptions and/ or misinformation frequently thrive by forcing people to be involved with news content in an emotional way rather than follow a logical path (Pennycook et al, 2020a).…”

Will the crowd game the algorithm? Using layperson judgments to combat misinformation on social media by downranking distrusted sources

“…Survey studies find that people who are more likely to engage in reasoning are less likely -not more likely -to believe and share false political headlines, regardless of ideological alignment [27,34,39]. Experiments show that -regardless of ideological alignment -engaging in reasoning causes decreased belief in false political headlines [3], whereas reliance on emotion causes increased belief in false headlines [23]. Furthermore, putting people into an accuracy mindset makes them less likely to share misinformation online [31].…”