The Psychology of Fake News

Abstract

We synthesize a burgeoning literature investigating why people believe and share false or highly misleading news online. Contrary to a common narrative whereby politics drives susceptibility to fake news, people are 'better' at discerning truth from falsehood (despite greater overall belief) when evaluating politically concordant news. Instead, poor truth discernment is associated with lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, and the use of heuristics such as familiarity. Furthermore, there is a substantial disconnect between what people believe and what they share on social media. This dissociation is largely driven by inattention, more so than by purposeful sharing of misinformation. Thus, interventions can successfully nudge social media users to focus more on accuracy. Crowdsourced veracity ratings can also be leveraged to improve social media ranking algorithms. Toward a Psychology of False and Misleading Online NewsFabricated news is nothing new. For example, in 1835 The Sun newspaper in New York published six articles about purported life on the moon which came to be known as the 'Great Moon Hoax'. During the 2016 US Presidential Election and UK Brexit Referendum, however, a different form of fake news (see Glossary) rose to prominence (Box 1): false or highly misleading political 'news' stories, primarily originating on social media [1]. Concern about fake news was redoubled in 2020 in the face of widespread misinformation and disinformation [2] on social media about the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic [3] and the 2020 US Presidential Election [4]. Misleading hyperpartisan news, as well as yellow journalism [5], are related forms of problematic news content that are likely sources of political polarization [6]. What is it about human psychologyand its interaction with social media [7,8] that explains the failure to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate content online? Apart from being of theoretical interest, this question has practical consequences: developing effective interventions against misinformation depends on understanding the underlying psychology.We focus here primarily on online content that is presented in the form of news articles. However, false and misleading claims come in many forms, and there are several literatures that are clearly related, but outside the scope of our review (although we will draw some connections throughout). These include work on conspiracy belief [9], superstition [10], rumors [11], bullshit receptivity [12], and misperceptions [13], among others. Furthermore, our focus is on individual examples of misinformation, and not on organized disinformation campaigns (e.g., by the Russian Internet Research Agency, or campaigns relating to global warming or fraud in the 2020 US Presidential Election). Why Do People Fall for Fake News?When considering the factors that may influence what people believe, it is essential to distinguish between two fundamentally different ways to conceptualize belief in true and false news. One common approach is to ...

Developing an accuracy-prompt toolkit to reduce COVID-19 misinformation online

“…Here, we advance the applicability of accuracy prompt interventions by asking which such interventions are effective. We focus on COVID-19 misinformation, and begin by replicating prior findings (Pennycook et al 2021;Pennycook, McPhetres, et al 2020) that, in the absence of any intervention, headline veracity has little impact on sharing intentions -despite participants being fairly discerning when asked to judge the accuracy of the headlines. That is, there is a substantial disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions.…”

“…The spread of inaccuracies on social media -including political "fake news" (Lazer et al 2018;Pennycook and Rand 2021) and COVID-19 misinformation (Pennycook, McPhetres, et al 2020) -is a topic of great societal concern and focus of academic research. Of particular importance is identifying approaches that technology companies could directly use to combat online misinformation.…”

“…Recent work suggests that misinformation sharing often occurs, not because people do not care about accuracy, but because people are distracted or focused on other elements when deciding what to share. As a result, shifting attention towards accuracy can help people attend to their existing -but often latent -capacity and desire to discern truth from falsehood, for both political misinformation (Fazio 2020;Jahanbakhsh et al 2021;Pennycook et al 2021) and COVID-19 misinformation (Pennycook, McPhetres, et al 2020). This approach is particularly appealing because it does not require technology companies to decide (e.g., via machine learning or human moderators) what is true versus false.…”

“…This approach is particularly appealing because it does not require technology companies to decide (e.g., via machine learning or human moderators) what is true versus false. Rather, emphasizing accuracy helps users exercise the (widely-held; see Pennycook et al 2021) desire to avoid sharing inaccurate content, preserving user autonomy. This approach is also appealing from a practical perspective because it makes accuracy prompts scalable (unlike, for example, professional fact-checking, which is typically slow and only covers a small fraction of all news content; Pennycook, Bear, et al 2020).…”

Understanding and countering the spread of conspiracy theories in social networks: Evidence from epidemiological models of Twitter data

“…Immediate and repeated communication of true facts is probably more efficient than the repeated correction of wrong information, but far more research is needed to translate the emerging cognitive psychology of information attacks into an efficient and versatile set of defensive measures [59,67]. Increasing evidence on the negative social consequences of conspiracy theories, e.g., for adherence to pandemic restrictions and vaccination recommendations, for the intention to engage in politics or for reducing one´s carbon footprint [68], underlines that efforts towards science-based solutions for addressing misinformation attacks may not only be well-invested, but ultimately vital.…”