Emotional news affects social judgments independent of perceived media credibility

Abstract

How does the credibility we attribute to media sources influence our opinions and judgments derived from news? Participants read headlines about the social behavior of depicted unfamiliar persons from websites of trusted or distrusted well-known German news media.As a consequence, persons paired with negative or positive headlines were judged more negative or positive than persons associated with neutral information independent of source credibility. Likewise, electrophysiological signatures of slow and controlled evaluative brain activity revealed a dominant influence of emotional headline contents regardless of credibility. Modulations of earlier brain responses associated with arousal and reflexive emotional processing show an effect of negative news and suggest that distrusted sources may even enhance the impact of negative headlines. These findings demonstrate that even though we acknowledge source credibility, information processing and social judgments rely on the emotional content of headlines, even when they stem from sources we distrust.

Emotional content reduces the cognitive effort invested in processing the credibility of social (mis)information

“…The consequences of news exposure can be conceptualized within dual-process theories that differentiate between fast, reflexive and slow, reflective systems or processes (Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007;Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006;Kahneman, 2003;Lieberman, 2007;Strack & Deutsch, 2004;Yonelinas, 2002).Within this framework, we originally predicted that reflexive processes would be mainly influenced by the emotional content whereas critically, slower, more controlled evaluative processes would take the credibility of the source into account, resulting in balanced social judgments. In contrast to these predictions, we found social judgments as well as underlying electrophysiological signatures related to controlled processing to be dominated by emotional contents, irrespective of source credibility (Baum & Abdel Rahman, 2020).…”

“…Scholz et al, 2017, Vosoughi et al, 2018. Recent studies investigating the impact of information of questionable veracity have provided first evidence that the emotional content strongly affects social judgements and neural correlates while the impact of trustworthiness is limited (Baum & Abdel Rahman, 2020;Baum, Rabovsky, Rose, & Abdel Rahman, 2018). Here, we investigate pupil dilation responses as indexes of the cognitive or emotional processes underpinning these judgments.…”

“…In a recent study we found that having a distinct perception about media sources' credibility, theoretically a valuable source to quickly assess the veracity of news, does not automatically lead to adjusted processing of faces associated with emotional headlines or attenuated subsequent judgments (Baum & Abdel Rahman, 2020). Persons were judged as negative or positive based on headline contents associated with them regardless of the sources' credibility.…”

“…To further probe the cognitive mechanisms underlying social judgments, here, we examine task-evoked pupillary responses during social judgments. We hypothesize that if pupil responses reflect emotional processing or motivated attention (Bradley et al, 2008;Kret et al, 2013) in a similar way as ERPs (Baum & Abdel Rahman, 2020), then pupil diameter should mainly show headline content effects independent of source credibility. Alternatively, if the pupil is more sensitive to attempts of cognitive control and invested mental effort (Baetty, 1982;Baetty & Lucero-Wagoner, 2000;Prehn et al, 2011), pupil diameter may in contrast reflect the additional processing load associated with varying levels of source credibility.…”

Prejudice drives exogenous attention to outgroups

“…A relevant issue at this point is whether high-level (or top-down) processes—such as social prejudice—may modulate N170 as they modulate later components such as EPN or LPP ( Baum et al., 2018 ; Baum and Abdel-Rahman, 2020 ). It is widely and traditionally accepted that N170 is sensitive to configural (low-level) aspects of faces (e.g.…”