scholarly journals The ``Fake News'' Effect: Experimentally Identifying Motivated Reasoning Using Trust in News

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Thaler
Keyword(s):  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Effect

scholarly journals Psychological Tribes and Processes: Understanding Why and How Misinformation Persists. To appear in P. Kendeou & D. Robinson (Eds.), Misinformation, ‘Quackery’, and ‘Fake News’ in Education.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Trevors
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Moral Emotions ◽  
Integrative Review ◽  
Threat Appraisal ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Antecedents And Consequences

Under certain conditions, attempting to correct misinformation ironically result in its strengthening. In the current integrative review, I draw upon cognitive, motivational, and social psychology and political science literatures to examine instances of correction failure that are due to individuals’ intentional rejection of attempted corrections, which I refer to as intentional correction resistance. The review highlighted that when individuals are faced with corrections that target misconceptions that are closely associated with individual and group identity, identity-protective motivation may explain why intentional correction resistance occurs. Further, the review also identified several mechanisms that may explain how this phenomenon occurs, including validation, distrust, inhibition failure, disfluency, threat appraisal, negative moral emotions, motivated reasoning, and reactance. By sketching out potential antecedents and consequences of this costly phenomenon, I hope that researchers and educators may have a more complete theoretical picture with which to enhance the effectiveness of corrective efforts.

Deciding What’s News: News-ness As an Audience Concept for the Hybrid Media Environment

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 416-434
Author(s):  
Stephanie Edgerly ◽  
Emily K. Vraga
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Audience Studies ◽  
Media Messages ◽  
Media System ◽  
Media Systems

A by-product of today’s hybrid media system is that genres—once uniformly defined and enforced—are now murky and contested. We develop the concept of news-ness, defined as the extent to which audiences characterize specific content as news, to capture how audiences understand and process media messages. In this article, we (a) ground the concept of news-ness within research on media genres, journalism practices, and audience studies, (b) develop a theoretical model that identifies the factors that influence news-ness and its outcomes, and (c) situate news-ness within discussions about fake news, partisan motivated reasoning, and comparative studies of media systems.

scholarly journals The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (11) ◽  
pp. 4944-4957 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
Adam Bear ◽  
Evan T. Collins ◽  
David G. Rand
Keyword(s):  
Formal Model ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Potential Consequence ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Truth Effect ◽  
News Headlines ◽  
Potential Challenge ◽  
Modest Reduction

What can be done to combat political misinformation? One prominent intervention involves attaching warnings to headlines of news stories that have been disputed by third-party fact-checkers. Here we demonstrate a hitherto unappreciated potential consequence of such a warning: an implied truth effect, whereby false headlines that fail to get tagged are considered validated and thus are seen as more accurate. With a formal model, we demonstrate that Bayesian belief updating can lead to such an implied truth effect. In Study 1 (n = 5,271 MTurkers), we find that although warnings do lead to a modest reduction in perceived accuracy of false headlines relative to a control condition (particularly for politically concordant headlines), we also observed the hypothesized implied truth effect: the presence of warnings caused untagged headlines to be seen as more accurate than in the control. In Study 2 (n = 1,568 MTurkers), we find the same effects in the context of decisions about which headlines to consider sharing on social media. We also find that attaching verifications to some true headlines—which removes the ambiguity about whether untagged headlines have not been checked or have been verified—eliminates, and in fact slightly reverses, the implied truth effect. Together these results contest theories of motivated reasoning while identifying a potential challenge for the policy of using warning tags to fight misinformation—a challenge that is particularly concerning given that it is much easier to produce misinformation than it is to debunk it. This paper was accepted by Elke Weber, judgment and decision making.

What Does It Take to Fight Fake News? Testing the Influence of Political Knowledge, Media Literacy, and General Trust on Motivated Reasoning

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-167
Author(s):  
Aleš Kudrnáč
Keyword(s):  
Media Literacy ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Fake News ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
General Trust ◽  
Literacy Training ◽  
Nationally Representative

This study explores youth accuracy judgments of disinformative and nondisinformative claims. Analyses are based on a nationally representative youth (16–20 years old) survey experiment conducted in the Czech Republic in 2017. When they were exposed to posts regarding refugee crisis, young people were asked to judge the accuracy of the statements accompanying the posts. Motivated reasoning of youth depended primarily on the alignment with the posts and the ideology of participants. Results of this research suggest that motivated reasoning works differently for liberals and conservatives. Perceived amount of media literacy training does not seem to affect directional motivation. General trust works as moderator of motivated reasoning and, in combination with ideology, appears to be important for understanding directional motivation when exposed to disinformation.

scholarly journals You are fake news: political bias in perceptions of fake news

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sander van der Linden ◽  
Costas Panagopoulos ◽  
Jon Roozenbeek
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
National Sample ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Fake News ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Fox News ◽  
The Us ◽  
News Effect

Although the rise of fake news is posing an increasing threat to societies worldwide, little is known about what associations the term ‘fake news’ activates in the public mind. Here, we report a psychological bias that we describe as the ‘fake news effect’: the tendency for partisans to use the term ‘fake news’ to discount and discredit ideologically uncongenial media sources. In a national sample of the US population ( N = 1000), we elicited top-of-mind associations with the term ‘fake news’. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find evidence that both liberals and conservatives freely associate traditionally left-wing (e.g. CNN) and right-wing (e.g. Fox News) media sources with the term fake news. Moreover, conservatives are especially likely to associate the mainstream media with the term fake news and these perceptions are generally linked to lower trust in media, voting for Trump, and higher belief in conspiracy theories.

scholarly journals Impact of Celebrity Endorsement and Breaking News Effect on the Attention of Consumers

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 60-74
Author(s):  
Laura Lazar ◽  
Mihai-Ionuţ Pop
Keyword(s):  
Fake News ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Private Companies ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Breaking News ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Us ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Use Of The Internet ◽  
News Effect

Abstract In the last decade, the new means of communication have determined substantial changes in human behavior and in the way individuals interact with each other. Besides the numerous benefits and opportunities that have arisen throughout the digitalization process, both for individuals as well as for private companies and state institutions, the widespread use of the Internet has generated vulnerabilities and threats. One of the most consistent concerns related to the new means of communication, especially social media platforms, refers to fake news. In recent years, major events including the 2016 presidential election in the US, Brexit, and the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic have proven the negative effects of fake news on society. In this paper, we use an eye-tracking experiment to determine the unconscious reactions of consumers regarding the attraction potential of a fake news manner written article about a celebrity couple. The results of the experiment for this magazine’s article, with a fake title about the celebrity couple, show that the participants focus their attention on celebrities and fake titles mostly. The picture of the celebrities and the fake title of the article beats the other areas from the article and less on the information in the text. The research proves empirically that consumers are more attentive to celebrity pictures and fake breaking news titles and less to real information in the article. To sum up, testimonials and fake news play an important role in attracting publicity and influencing consumer behavior.

scholarly journals The cognitive science of fake news

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil L Levy ◽  
Robert M Ross
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Cognitive Sciences

In this chapter, we provide a necessarily brief and partial survey of recent work in the cognitive sciences directly on or closely related to the psychology of fake news, in particular fake news in the political domain. We focus on whether and why people believe fake news. While we argue that it is likely that a large proportion of people who purport to believe fake news really do, we provide evidence that this proportion might be significantly smaller than is usually thought (and smaller than is suggested by surveys). Assertion of belief is inflated, we suggest, by insincere report, whether to express support for one side of political debate or simply for fun. It is also inflated by the use of motivated inference of one sort or another, which lead respondents to report believing things about which they had no opinion prior to being probed. We then turn to rival accounts that aim to explain why people believe in fake news when they do. While partisan explanations, turning on motivated reasoning, are probably best known, we show they face serious challenges from accounts that explain belief by reference to analytic thinking.

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