Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon

Abstract

This study investigated the cognitive processing of true and false political information. Specifically, it examined the impact of source credibility on the assessment of veracity when information comes from a polarizing source (Experiment 1), and effectiveness of explanations when they come from one's own political party or an opposition party (Experiment 2). These experiments were conducted prior to the 2016 Presidential election. Participants rated their belief in factual and incorrect statements that President Trump made on the campaign trail; facts were subsequently affirmed and misinformation retracted. Participants then re-rated their belief immediately or after a delay. Experiment 1 found that (i) if information was attributed to Trump, Republican supporters of Trump believed it more than if it was presented without attribution, whereas the opposite was true for Democrats and (ii) although Trump supporters reduced their belief in misinformation items following a correction, they did not change their voting preferences. Experiment 2 revealed that the explanation's source had relatively little impact, and belief updating was more influenced by perceived credibility of the individual initially purporting the information. These findings suggest that people use political figures as a heuristic to guide evaluation of what is true or false, yet do not necessarily insist on veracity as a prerequisite for supporting political candidates.

Fighting the Past: Perceptions of Control, Historical Misperceptions, and Corrective Information in the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict

“…However, reducing historical misperceptions did not lead to changes in Jewish Israeli attitudes towards Arab Israelis and Palestinians or core issues in the peace process, which echo recent studies showing that corrective information changed factual beliefs but did not did not affect candidate opinions during the 2016 U.S. presidential race (Swire, Berinsky, Lewandowsky, & Ecker, 2017;Nyhan et al, n.d.). In many contexts, changing factual beliefs may not be enough to change opinions.…”

Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking

“…Second, analytic individuals may be using a simple source‐heuristic—that is, they may think fake news is less accurate than more intuitive individuals simply because they are more likely to pay attention to the fact that fake news stories do not come from trusted sources. This possibility is supported by evidence that higher CRT people are more trusting of reputable sources (Pennycook & Rand, ), and that source credibility plays a role in persuasion (Landrum et al, ; Pornpitakpan, ), including in political domains (Swire et al, ). To test whether more analytic individuals rely on the source to make judgments about news accuracy, we removed the source of the news stories (both fake and real) for half of the participants.…”

Systematic Literature Review on the Spread of Health-related Misinformation on Social Media

“…We do know that people regard information from the internet as being as credible as conventional media such as television and radio, but not as that from newspapers (Johnson and Kaye, 1998;Kim and Johnson, 2009). Many studies have thus analysed the credibility of user-generated contents and the cognitive process involved in the decision to spread online information on social and political events (Abbasi and Liu, 2013;Castillo et al, 2011;Lupia, 2013;Swire et al, 2017). This research has highlighted the importance of source credibility and persuasiveness as factors affecting the susceptibility of users to the messages conveyed.…”