Exposure to Higher Rates of False News Erodes Media Trust and Fuels Overconfidence

Altay, Sacha; Lyons, Benjamin A.; Modirrousta-Galian, Ariana

doi:10.31234/osf.io/t9r43

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…It is also important to keep in mind that the contrast effect we demonstrate here is not incompatible with a simultaneous assimilation effect (wherein exposure to a high prevalence of implausible claims shifts people's sense of veracity base rates and increases overall belief) (12,13). The combination of a more liberal plausibility threshold for classifying news as true (contrast effect) and an increased bias towards judging headlines as false (assimilation effect) can lead to net increased belief in ambiguous news.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 56%

“…While recent work has shown that prior exposure to the same false story can make that story more believable (9)(10)(11), it is not clear whether exposure to one set of implausible claims in news could make other, unrelated stories seem more or less plausible by contrast. On the one hand, a high prevalence of implausible news stories could make consumers more generally skeptical, falling for fewer inaccurate headlines while also disbelieving accurate ones (12,13). Such an assimilation effect would converge with similar work on the role of prevalence in perceptual signal detection (14), in which a high prevalence of signals (in this case, implausible news stories) can make them easier to accurately recognize.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Blatantly false news increases belief in news that is merely implausible

Levari,

Martel,

Orchinik

et al. 2024

Preprint

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What are the consequences of encountering blatant falsehoods and “fake news”? Here we show that exposure to a high prevalence of very implausible claims can increase belief in other, more ambiguous false claims, as they seem more believable in comparison. Participants in five preregistered experiments (N=5,476) were exposed to lower or higher rates of news headlines that seemed blatantly false, as well as some more plausible true and false headlines. Being exposed to a higher prevalence of extremely implausible headlines increased belief in unrelated headlines which were more ambiguous (or even plausible), regardless of whether they were true or false. The effect persisted for headlines describing hypothetical events, as well as actual true and false news headlines. It occurred whether people actively evaluated the headlines or read them passively, among liberals and conservatives, and among those high or low in cognitive reflection. We observed this effect in environments where the plausibility of a claim was a reliable and useful cue to whether it was true or false, and in environments where plausibility and truth were unrelated. We argue that a high prevalence of blatantly implausible claims lowers the threshold of plausibility for other claims to seem believable. Such relative comparisons are a hallmark of the brain’s tendency towards efficient computations in perception and judgment. Even when consumers can reliably identify and disregard blatantly false news content, encountering such content may make subtler falsehoods more likely to be believed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 56%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Blatantly false news increases belief in news that is merely implausible

Levari,

Martel,

Orchinik

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Additionally, there can be substantial heterogeneity in exposure to informational quality at the individual level by source (Lin et al, 2023b), within platforms (Guess et al, 2020;González-Bail ón et al, 2023), when there are algorithmic changes (Guess et al, 2023), across platform (Allcott et al, 2019), or between topics (Praet et al, 2022). Our results suggest that different intuitions can develop, including feelings of skepticism in low quality environments (Altay et al, 2023), under this heterogeneity and that overly wide priors can be misapplied when shifts in the environment are not salient. Of additional concern is the possibility that misinformation purveyors can hijack or create high-quality environments to push specific misinformation more effectively (Stewart et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Uncommon Errors: Adaptive Intuitions in High-Quality Media Environments Increase Susceptibility to Misinformation

Orchinik,

Martel,

Rand

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Belief in misinformation has been linked in part to digital media environments promoting reliance on intuition -- which in turn has been shown to increase belief in falsehoods. Here we propose that this apparently irrational behavior may actually result from ecologically rational adaptations to complex environments. In a large survey experiment, we test whether intuitive belief in misinformation may result from these rational adaptations by randomizing participants to be shown either a largely true or largely false news feed. We show that individuals make more frequent and quicker errors on the less common headline type, and less frequent errors on the more common headline type. After seeing many true headlines, a participant is more likely to misidentify a subsequent false headline as true, and vice versa after seeing many false headlines. This pattern is consistent with adaptation to the proportion of true and false content (the veracity base rate). We use computational modeling to show that these differences are driven by intuitions, which correspond to Bayesian priors, about the veracity of the content -- intuitions which then spill over into new environments. Our results, when paired with the observation that the news consumed by most Americans is overwhelmingly true, suggest that belief in misinformation and the intuitions that underlie it are not necessarily a failing of humans in digital environments but can be a byproduct of rational adaptations to them.

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“…Recent studies have shown that the information composition of the information environment, specifically the relative proportion of true to false information, can significantly influence participants' susceptibility to misinformation 27,28 . Notably, Orchinik et al 27 found that participants were more likely to erroneously classify false (true) information as true (false) when exposed to predominantly true (false) information in the experimental information environment, suggesting that participants responses were biased in the direction of the "veracity base rate" (see also 28 ).…”

Section: Nudge-based Misinformation Interventions Are Effective In In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nudge-based misinformation interventions are effective in information environments with low misinformation prevalence

Butler,

Prike,

Ecker

2024

Sci Rep

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Nudge-based misinformation interventions are presented as cheap and effective ways to reduce the spread of misinformation online. However, despite online information environments typically containing relatively low volumes of misinformation, most studies testing the effectiveness of nudge interventions present equal proportions of true and false information. As the effectiveness of nudges can be highly context-dependent, it is imperative to validate the effectiveness of nudge-based interventions in environments with more realistic proportions of misinformation. The current study (N = 1387) assessed the effectiveness of a combined accuracy and social-norm nudge in simulated social-media environments with varying proportions of misinformation (50%, 20%, and 12.5%) relative to true and non-news-based (i.e., “social”) information. The nudge intervention was effective at improving sharing discernment in conditions with lower proportions of misinformation, providing ecologically valid support for the use of nudge-based interventions to counter misinformation propagation on social media.

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Exposure to Higher Rates of False News Erodes Media Trust and Fuels Overconfidence

Cited by 10 publications

References 39 publications

Blatantly false news increases belief in news that is merely implausible

Blatantly false news increases belief in news that is merely implausible

Uncommon Errors: Adaptive Intuitions in High-Quality Media Environments Increase Susceptibility to Misinformation

Nudge-based misinformation interventions are effective in information environments with low misinformation prevalence

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