Study on Fake News Revealed Two Unusual Trends

According to the researchers, two unusual trends are apparent: the participants may allow personal biases to impact their ability to authenticate news, and people are more skeptical of news from alternative outlets. 

The experiment aimed to gain insight into how the nation’s citizens determine the authenticity of news in the digital age. 

The visiting assistant professor at George Washington University continued, “A great deal of high-quality research has suggested that technological factors, such as a chaotic social media environment, can lead to quick, surface-level consideration of new information.”

“Drawing on social-cognitive psychology and communication science, we argued that even people who want to process more deeply may do so in biased ways. Even people who are aware of their potential for bias may have difficulty truly correcting for that bias,” said Sude.

Essentially, people get caught in a positive feedback loop that leaves little room for information that challenges them. This leads to blind spots and impairs the ability of someone to identify misinformation.

With this bias people overestimate their own ability to filter information when they have limited competence to do so. The worse someone is at something, the more confident the person is that they actually perform well at that activity.

“Believing true information by accident or rejecting false information by accident is not, in our minds, sufficient. We want to know what leads people to take their time and patiently come to, hopefully, correct conclusions. Our two-study paper is just one of many tackling that question,” he said.

Following this, they were shown some form of fake news that aligned with their political beliefs. Those who considered themselves strong Democrats were shown a phony headline titled, “Trump Say Republicans Are the ‘Dumbest Group of Voters.’”

But, for the second part of the study, the focus was on authentic news instead of fake articles. Yet, the same approach of informing the participants on whether it was from a mainstream or alternative outlet remained the same.

“People, at least when participating in our online studies, were remarkably suspicious of content from an unfamiliar news outlet,” Sude told PsyPost.

A Columbia University study found that 59% of links shared across social media by users have never even been clicked. This implies the sharer only read the headline before sharing.

Fortune reported that half of Americans believe that news organizations deliberately report the news in a way that is misleading. These Americans feel like news media today has a clear agenda and can only find the faults in their reporting.

“This contrasts with other studies suggesting that people tend to pay more attention to content than to sources. This could have something to do with our design – people were looking at headlines and lead ‘posted’ to social media,” he said. 

One possible explanation for this behavior is that a media consumer cares more about how the information looks to others independent of the actual validity behind it. People want to provide a good first impression for the information they share.

“Strong partisans (Democrats or Republicans), particularly those concerned with media bias, acknowledged that the source was unfamiliar but defended its content anyway,” Sude explained.

A report by the Pew Research Center in 2020 noted that 77% of Americans think the country is more divided than before the pandemic. In 2023, Axios reported that the partisan divide between Americans is 40 percent.

This has led to some outlets producing “rage bait” content, where the goal is to give a strong opinion to make a media viewer “rage click” to read the article.

Harvard published a report that found that anger is a contributor to the spread of fake COVID-19 misinformation. Anger also makes it easier for fake news to go viral online. When people rely on their emotions, it makes it easier for them to fall for misleading news content.

However, those with stronger political beliefs and a high media literacy appeared to believe more fake news, which was ultimately deemed an unusual paradox by the researchers.

Only 42% of respondents to the survey said that they were trained on how to analyze science news as a part of their high school curriculum. An even smaller percentage, only 38%, said they had properly learned how to analyze media messages.

This is compounded by the fact that Americans are increasingly unable to recognize a fake news post before they share it. This is an exponential problem because as more people share a fake story the likelihood increases of more people seeing and sharing it.

The study team leader Ben Lyons concluded “In all, these results paint a worrying picture: The individuals who are least equipped to identify false news content are also the least aware of their own limitations and, therefore, more susceptible to believing it and spreading it further.”

Republicans overestimate their ability to identify misinformation more than Democrats. Another reason for the discrepancy between political affiliations is that Republicans have a lower bar for media sources they will trust.

The team acknowledges interventions must focus on decreasing the influence of political biases and increasing the overall media literacy among daily readers.