Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning

Pennycook, G. & Rand, D. G.

Cognition. (2019)

Volume 188, July 2019, Pages 39-50

Abstract

Why do people believe blatantly inaccurate news headlines (“fake news”)? Do we use our reasoning abilities to convince ourselves that statements that align with our ideology are true, or does reasoning allow us to effectively differentiate fake from real regardless of political ideology? Here we test these competing accounts in two studies (total N = 3,446 Mechanical Turk workers) by using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) as a measure of the propensity to engage in analytical reasoning. We find that CRT performance is negatively correlated with the perceived accuracy of fake news, and positively correlated with the ability to discern fake news from real news – even for headlines that align with individuals’ political ideology. Moreover, overall discernment was actually better for ideologically aligned headlines than for misaligned headlines. Finally, a headline-level analysis finds that CRT is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively implausible (primarily fake) headlines, and positively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively plausible (primarily real) headlines. In contrast, the correlation between CRT and perceived accuracy is unrelated to how closely the headline aligns with the participant’s ideology. Thus, we conclude that analytic thinking is used to assess the plausibility of headlines, regardless of whether the stories are consistent or inconsistent with one’s political ideology. Our findings therefore suggest that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se – a finding that opens potential avenues for fighting fake news.

Highlights

• Participants rated perceived accuracy of fake and real news headlines.

• Analytic thinking was associated with ability to discern between fake and real.

• We found no evidence that analytic thinking exacerbates motivated reasoning.

• Falling for fake news is more a result of a lack of thinking than partisanship.

The research is here.

The Cognitive Science of Fake News

Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. 

(2020, November 18). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ar96c

Abstract

We synthesize a burgeoning literature investigating why people believe and share “fake news” and other misinformation online. Surprisingly, the evidence contradicts a common narrative whereby partisanship and politically motivated reasoning explain failures to discern truth from falsehood. Instead, poor truth discernment is linked to a lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, and to the use of familiarity and other heuristics. Furthermore, there is a substantial disconnect between what people believe and what they will share on social media. This dissociation is largely driven by inattention, rather than purposeful sharing of misinformation. As a result, effective interventions can nudge social media users to think about accuracy, and can leverage crowdsourced veracity ratings to improve social media ranking algorithms.

From the Discussion

Indeed, recent research shows that a simple accuracy nudge intervention –specifically, having participants rate the accuracy of a single politically neutral headline (ostensibly as part of a pretest) prior to making judgments about social media sharing –improves the extent to which people discern between true and false news content when deciding what to share online in survey experiments. This approach has also been successfully deployed in a large-scale field experiment on Twitter, in which messages asking users to rate the accuracy of a random headline were sent to thousands of accounts who recently shared links to misinformation sites. This subtle nudge significantly increased the quality of the content they subsequently shared; see Figure3B. Furthermore, survey experiments have shown that asking participants to explain how they know if a headline is true of false before sharing it increases sharing discernment, and having participants rate accuracy at the time of encoding protects against familiarity effects."