Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning
TL;DR: This paper found that cognitive reflection test performance is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy of fake news, and positively correlated with the ability to distinguish fake news from real news, even for headlines that align with individuals' political ideology.
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.
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New York University1, University of Chicago2, Mackenzie Presbyterian University3, Middlesex University4, University of Kent5, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń6, Harvard University7, Yale University8, Stanford University9, Northwestern University10, University of Sussex11, Utrecht University12, University of California, San Diego13, University of Maryland, College Park14, McGovern Institute for Brain Research15, University of Queensland16, University of Michigan17, California Institute of Technology18, Lehigh University19, University of Regina20, University of Oregon21, Ohio State University22, Massachusetts Institute of Technology23, University of St Andrews24, University of Cambridge25, University of British Columbia26, University of Illinois at Chicago27, University of California, Berkeley28, Carleton University29, VU University Amsterdam30, Cornell University31
TL;DR: Evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics is discussed, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping.
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.
3,223 citations
TL;DR: The results, which mirror those found previously for political fake news, suggest that nudging people to think about accuracy is a simple way to improve choices about what to share on social media.
Abstract: Across two studies with more than 1,700 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not the content is accurate when deciding what to share. In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they were asked directly about accuracy. Furthermore, greater cognitive reflection and science knowledge were associated with stronger discernment. In Study 2, we found that a simple accuracy reminder at the beginning of the study (i.e., judging the accuracy of a non-COVID-19-related headline) nearly tripled the level of truth discernment in participants' subsequent sharing intentions. Our results, which mirror those found previously for political fake news, suggest that nudging people to think about accuracy is a simple way to improve choices about what to share on social media.
914 citations
Cites background or result from "Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to..."
...…2017; Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018), our data are more consistent with recent studies on political misinformation that provide both correlational (Pennycook & Rand, 2019b; including data from Twitter sharing, Mosleh, Pennycook, Arechar, & Rand, 2020) and experimental (Bago, Rand, & Pennycook,…...
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...Such ratings could also potentially help identify misinformation via crowdsourcing (Pennycook & Rand, 2019a)—especially given that, at least for the 30 headlines considered here, participants (on average) rated the true headlines as much more accurate than the false headlines....
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...The pattern of CRT correlations observed here for COVID-19 misinformation is therefore consistent with what has been seen previously with political headlines (Pennycook & Rand, 2019b; Ross, Rand, & Pennycook, 2019)....
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...A key outcome from the news task is truth discernment— that is, the extent to which individuals distinguish between true and false content in their judgments (Pennycook & Rand, 2019b)....
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TL;DR: A clear link between susceptibility to misinformation and both vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood to comply with health guidance measures is demonstrated, and interventions which aim to improve critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research.
Abstract: Misinformation about COVID-19 is a major threat to public health. Using five national samples from the UK (n = 1050 and n = 1150), Ireland (n = 700), the USA (n = 700), Spain (n = 700) and Mexico (n = 700), we examine predictors of belief in the most common statements about the virus that contain misinformation. We also investigate the prevalence of belief in COVID-19 misinformation across different countries and the role of belief in such misinformation in predicting relevant health behaviours. We find that while public belief in misinformation about COVID-19 is not particularly common, a substantial proportion views this type of misinformation as highly reliable in each country surveyed. In addition, a small group of participants find common factual information about the virus highly unreliable. We also find that increased susceptibility to misinformation negatively affects people's self-reported compliance with public health guidance about COVID-19, as well as people's willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and to recommend the vaccine to vulnerable friends and family. Across all countries surveyed, we find that higher trust in scientists and having higher numeracy skills were associated with lower susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation. Taken together, these results demonstrate a clear link between susceptibility to misinformation and both vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood to comply with health guidance measures, and suggest that interventions which aim to improve critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research.
797 citations
TL;DR: An increasing trend in published articles on health-related misinformation and the role of social media in its propagation is observed, and the most extensively studied topics involving misinformation relate to vaccination, Ebola and Zika Virus, although others, such as nutrition, cancer, fluoridation of water and smoking also featured.
773 citations
Cites background from "Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to..."
...In particular, there is a need to understand better the roles of both ideology and belief systems (Jost et al., 2018) and what might be termed "lazy thinking" (Pennycook and Rand, 2018) ....
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TL;DR: It is found that laypeople—on average—are quite good at distinguishing between lower- and higher-quality sources, and having algorithms up-rank content from trusted media outlets may be a promising approach for fighting the spread of misinformation on social media.
Abstract: Reducing the spread of misinformation, especially on social media, is a major challenge. We investigate one potential approach: having social media platform algorithms preferentially display content from news sources that users rate as trustworthy. To do so, we ask whether crowdsourced trust ratings can effectively differentiate more versus less reliable sources. We ran two preregistered experiments (n = 1,010 from Mechanical Turk and n = 970 from Lucid) where individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: (i) mainstream media outlets, (ii) hyperpartisan websites, and (iii) websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”). Despite substantial partisan differences, we find that laypeople across the political spectrum rated mainstream sources as far more trustworthy than either hyperpartisan or fake news sources. Although this difference was larger for Democrats than Republicans—mostly due to distrust of mainstream sources by Republicans—every mainstream source (with one exception) was rated as more trustworthy than every hyperpartisan or fake news source across both studies when equally weighting ratings of Democrats and Republicans. Furthermore, politically balanced layperson ratings were strongly correlated (r = 0.90) with ratings provided by professional fact-checkers. We also found that, particularly among liberals, individuals higher in cognitive reflection were better able to discern between low- and high-quality sources. Finally, we found that excluding ratings from participants who were not familiar with a given news source dramatically reduced the effectiveness of the crowd. Our findings indicate that having algorithms up-rank content from trusted media outlets may be a promising approach for fighting the spread of misinformation on social media.
421 citations
Cites background or result from "Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to..."
...29), a widely used measure of analytic thinking that prior work has found to be associated with an increased capacity to discern true headlines from false headlines (13, 15, 26)....
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...Second, as with previous results at the level of individual headlines (13, 15, 26), people who were more reflective were better (not worse) at discerning between mainstream and fake/hyperpartisan sources....
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...Furthermore, conservatives tend to be less reflective and more intuitive than liberals (at least in the United States) (19)—a particularly relevant distinction given that lack of reflection is associated with susceptibility to fake news headlines (13, 15)....
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...Recently, however, this motivated account of misinformation consumption has been challenged by work showing that greater cognitive reflection is associated with better truth discernment regardless of headlines’ ideological alignment— suggesting that falling for misinformation results from lack of reasoning rather than politically motivated reasoning per se (13)....
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References
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Book•
01 Jan 2011TL;DR: Buku terlaris New York Times and The Economist tahun 2012 as mentioned in this paper, and dipilih oleh The NewYork Times Book Review sebagai salah satu dari sepuluh buku terbaik tahune 2011, Berpikir, Cepat and Lambat ditakdirkan menjadi klasik.
Abstract: Buku terlaris New York Times
Pemenang Penghargaan Buku Terbaik Akademi Sains Nasional pada tahun 2012
Dipilih oleh New York Times Book Review sebagai salah satu dari sepuluh buku terbaik tahun 2011
A Globe and Mail Judul Buku Terbaik Tahun 2011
Salah Satu Buku The Economist tahun 2011
Salah Satu Buku Nonfiksi Terbaik The Wall Street Journal of the Year 2011
2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient
Pekerjaan Kahneman dengan Amos Tversky adalah subyek dari Proyek Undoing Michael Lewis: Persahabatan yang Mengubah Pikiran Kita
Dalam buku terlaris internasional, Berpikir, Cepat, dan Lambat, Daniel Kahneman, psikolog terkenal dan pemenang Hadiah Nobel dalam Ekonomi, membawa kita pada perjalanan pemikiran yang inovatif dan menjelaskan dua sistem yang mendorong cara kita berpikir. Sistem 1 cepat, intuitif, dan emosional; Sistem 2 lebih lambat, lebih deliberatif, dan lebih logis. Dampak dari terlalu percaya pada strategi perusahaan, kesulitan memprediksi apa yang akan membuat kita bahagia di masa depan, efek mendalam dari bias kognitif dalam segala hal mulai dari bermain pasar saham hingga merencanakan liburan kita berikutnya ― masing-masing dapat dipahami hanya dengan mengetahui bagaimana kedua sistem tersebut membentuk penilaian dan keputusan kami.
Melibatkan pembaca dalam percakapan yang hidup tentang bagaimana kita berpikir, Kahneman mengungkapkan di mana kita bisa dan tidak dapat mempercayai intuisi kita dan bagaimana kita dapat memanfaatkan manfaat dari pemikiran yang lambat. Dia menawarkan wawasan praktis dan mencerahkan tentang bagaimana pilihan dibuat baik dalam bisnis kita dan kehidupan pribadi kita ― dan bagaimana kita dapat menggunakan teknik yang berbeda untuk menjaga gangguan mental yang sering membawa kita ke dalam masalah. Pemenang Penghargaan Buku Terbaik Akademi Sains Nasional dan Hadiah Buku Los Angeles Times dan dipilih oleh The New York Times Book Review sebagai salah satu dari sepuluh buku terbaik tahun 2011, Berpikir, Cepat dan Lambat ditakdirkan menjadi klasik.
12,984 citations
"Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to..." refers background in this paper
...According to dual-process theory, human cognition can be characterized by a distinction between autonomous, intuitive (System 1) processes and deliberative, analytic (System 2) processes (De Neys, 2012; Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Kahneman, 2011; Pennycook, Fugelsang, & Koehler, 2015a)....
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01 Jan 1969
6,810 citations
"Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to..." refers result in this paper
...This research supports the presumption, pervasive in “classical reasoning” approaches (Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1932), that reasoning supports sound judgment....
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Book•
01 Jan 1932
TL;DR: The Moral Judgment of the Child by Jean Piaget as mentioned in this paper chronicles the evolution of children's moral thinking from preschool to adolescence, tracing their concepts of lying, cheating, adult authority, punishment, and responsibility and offering important insights into how they learn -or fail to learn -the difference between right and wrong.
Abstract: The Moral Judgment of the Child By Jean Piaget The seminal book by this century's most important developmental psychologist chronicles the evolution of children's moral thinking from preschool to adolescence, tracing their concepts of lying, cheating, adult authority, punishment, and responsibility and offering important insights into how they learn -or fail to learn -the difference between right and wrong.
4,620 citations
"Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to..." refers result in this paper
...This research supports the presumption, pervasive in “classical reasoning” approaches (Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1932), that reasoning supports sound judgment....
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TL;DR: A large-scale analysis of tweets reveals that false rumors spread further and faster than the truth, and false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information.
Abstract: We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.
4,241 citations
TL;DR: The authors found that people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks, and that the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them.
Abstract: Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; (iii) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and (iv) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.
3,959 citations
"Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to..." refers background in this paper
...Much has been made of the potential effect that fake news had on voting for the 2016 US Presidential election (e.g., Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Faris et al., 2017; Lazer et al., 2018); the underlying presumption is that people are, in fact, responsive to fake news in important ways....
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...Nonetheless, fake news as it has been discussed recently (e.g., Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Shane, 2017) seems to have gained an unprecedented level of prominence through the rise of social media....
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...…why Republican-consistent fake news was apparently more common than Democrat-consistent fake news leading up to the 2016 Presidential election (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Guess, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2018) and why the media ecosystem (including open web links, and both Twitter and Facebook…...
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