Stephen Crane's Private War on Yellow Journalism

Gullason, Thomas A.

doi:10.2307/3816557

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 2 publications

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“…It has even been reported that fake news diffuses faster than real news on social media platforms (Silverman et al, 2016; Vosoughi et al, 2018), especially disrupting people’s immediate response to political events, including the 2016 and 2020 United States presidential elections (Funke, 2020; Grinberg et al, 2019) and the 2016 Brexit Referendum (Rosenberg, 2016). Yet, fake news is an age-old problem (Mansky, 2018), which has been evident throughout the development of writing systems (Marcus, 1992), the printing press (Rosaldo, 1981), and modern newspapers (Gullason, 1959). Instead of decrying the role those emerging technologies have played in the current issues of misinformation, therefore, it is critical to understand cognitive mechanisms contributing to people’s susceptibility to misinformation.…”

Section: Associative Inferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of associative inference on individuals’ susceptibility to misinformation.

Xiong¹,

Lee²,

Seo³

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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Associative inference is an adaptive process of memory that allows people to recombine associated information and make novel inferences. We report two online human-subject experiments investigating an associative inference version in which participants viewed overlapping real-news pairs (AB&BC) that could later be linked to support inferences of misinformation (AC). In each experiment, we examined participants' recognition and perceived accuracy of snippets of news articles presented as tweets across two phases. At Phase 1, only real-news tweets were presented, which were associated with political news of Phase 2 at three levels: real, fake, and fake with inference. In Experiment 2, participants' cognitive ability was also assessed. Participants recognized more but gave lower accuracy ratings for the fake news with inference than the fake news in both experiments. The effect of associative inference was more evident in the perceived accuracy ratings for participants of higher cognitive ability than those of lower cognitive ability. We conclude that associative inference can make people become susceptible to misinformation. We also discuss the results in terms of why associative inference made people susceptible to misinformation in the relatively automatic familiarity judgment (i.e., recognition) but not the relatively controlled and effortful semantic judgment (i.e., accuracy rating). Public Significance StatementThe present study shows that associative inference, an adaptive cognitive mechanism, can make participants susceptible to misinformation in the recognition judgment. However, participants, especially those of higher cognitive ability, gave lower accuracy ratings for fake news with associative inference than that without associative inference, indicating less susceptibility to the semantic judgment.

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