Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online

Abstract

<p>The spread of false and misleading news content on social media is of great societal concern. Why do people share such content, and what can be done about it? In a first survey experiment (N=1,015), we demonstrate a disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions: even though true headlines are rated as much more accurate than false headlines, headline veracity has little impact on sharing. Although this may seem to indicate that people share inaccurate content because they care more about furthering their political agenda than they care about truth, we propose an alternative attentional account: Most people do not want to spread misinformation, but the social media context focuses their attention on factors other than truth and accuracy. Indeed, when directly asked, most participants say it is important to only share news that is accurate. Accordingly, across four survey experiments (total N=3,485) and a digital field experiment on Twitter in which we messaged users who had previously shared news from websites known for publishing misleading content (N=5,379), we find that inducing people to think about the concept of accuracy increases the quality of the news they subsequently share. Together, these results challenge the narrative that people no longer care about accuracy. Instead, the results support our inattention-based account wherein people fail to implement their preference for accuracy due to attentional constraints. Furthermore, our research provides evidence for scalable anti-misinformation interventions that are easily implementable by social media platforms.</p>

Will the crowd game the algorithm? Using layperson judgments to combat misinformation on social media by downranking distrusted sources

“…It is not advisable to address it by only considering judgments of people who are familiar with a given source [33], as there are large selection effects: for example, people who tend to believe fake news are much more likely to visit -and therefore be familiar with -fake news sources. Instead, potential solutions include (i) showing raters sample content from each website before asking for their trust ratings, and (ii) having raters rate the accuracy of individual articles (without knowing the sources from which the articles come), and then creating site-level ratings by aggregating the accuracy scores of the articles from each site (this form of crowdsourcing would also have the added benefit of inducing an accuracy mindset in users, potentially leading them to share less misinformation themselves [31]). Investigating the effectiveness of these approaches to addressing the familiarity issue is an important direction for future research.…”

“…Experiments show that -regardless of ideological alignment -engaging in reasoning causes decreased belief in false political headlines [3], whereas reliance on emotion causes increased belief in false headlines [23]. Furthermore, putting people into an accuracy mindset makes them less likely to share misinformation online [31]. Taken together, these results suggest that if laypeople are asked to think about the trustworthiness of news sources, their judgments may not be unduly swayed by partisanship.…”

Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news

“…Belief in fake news has also been associated with dogmatism, religious fundamentalism, and reflexive (rather than active/reflective) open-minded thinking (Bronstein et al, 2019;Pennycook & Rand, 2019c). A recent experiment has even shown that encouraging people to think deliberately, rather than intuitively, decreased self-reported likelihood of 'liking' or sharing fake news on social media (Effron & Raj, 2020), as did asking people to judge the accuracy of every headline prior to making a sharing decision (Fazio, 2020), or simply asking for a single accuracy judgment at the outset of the study (Pennycook et al, 2019;Pennycook et al, 2020).…”

Beyond “fake news”: Analytic thinking and the detection of false and hyperpartisan news headlines

“…Furthermore, the reason why misleading content is believed relates to its intuitive appeal; content that is highly emotional (Martel, Pennycook, & Rand, 2019) or that provokes moral outrage (Brady, Gantmam, & Van Bavel, 2020;Crockett, 2017) draws people's attention and, since our cognitive system prioritizes miserly processing (Fisk & Taylor, 1984;Stanovich, 2004), many individuals fail to effectively stop and reflect on their faulty intuitions. Indeed, it may be that social media is particularly conducive to inattention (Weng, Flammini, Vespignani, & Menczer, 2012) and it may surface social motivations (e.g., maximize getting "likes") that distract from otherwise salient accuracy motivations (Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2020;Pennycook, McPhetres, Zhang, Lu, & Rand, 2020).…”

“…Another issue with past work is that it has focused almost exclusively on people's judgments about the accuracy of news content. This is a major problem because the motivation to accurately interpret news content may be triggered by simply being asked to judge accuracy (Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2020). The task itself may bias the test in favour of classical reasoning in lieu of MS2R.…”