Social and Cognitive Aspects of the Vulnerability to Political Misinformation

Pantazi, Myrto; Hale, Scott A.; Klein, Olivier

doi:10.1111/pops.12797

Cited by 25 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 265 publications

(366 reference statements)

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“…The effects of misinformation on behavior extend to the rise in far-right platforms (Z. Chen et al, 2021), religious extremism impacting voting behavior (Das & Schroeder, 2021), disengagement in political voting (Drucker & Barreras, 2005; Finetti et al, 2020; Galeotti, 2020), intended voting behavior (Pantazi et al, 2021), and advertising aligned with fake news reports leading to increased consumer spending (Di Domenico et al, 2021; Di Domenico & Visentin, 2020). A further study examined the unconscious influences of misinformation (specifically fake news) in a priming study, demonstrating direct effects on the speed of tapping responses (Bastick, 2021).…”

Section: The “Problem” Of Misinformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?

Adams

Osman

Bechlivanidis

et al. 2023

Perspect Psychol Sci

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In the last decade there has been a proliferation of research on misinformation. One important aspect of this work that receives less attention than it should is exactly why misinformation is a problem. To adequately address this question, we must first look to its speculated causes and effects. We examined different disciplines (computer science, economics, history, information science, journalism, law, media, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology) that investigate misinformation. The consensus view points to advancements in information technology (e.g., the Internet, social media) as a main cause of the proliferation and increasing impact of misinformation, with a variety of illustrations of the effects. We critically analyzed both issues. As to the effects, misbehaviors are not yet reliably demonstrated empirically to be the outcome of misinformation; correlation as causation may have a hand in that perception. As to the cause, advancements in information technologies enable, as well as reveal, multitudes of interactions that represent significant deviations from ground truths through people’s new way of knowing (intersubjectivity). This, we argue, is illusionary when understood in light of historical epistemology. Both doubts we raise are used to consider the cost to established norms of liberal democracy that come from efforts to target the problem of misinformation.

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Section: The “Problem” Of Misinformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?

Adams

Osman

Bechlivanidis

et al. 2023

Perspect Psychol Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Therefore, we should expect incoming information from sources estimated to be credible to be given more weight in the inference process than information from sources estimated as untrustworthy. Ideological worldviews and identities can also shape trust in specific sources, so estimated credibility is typically predicted by partisan identities or worldviews (as in Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016; however, see Henkel & Mattson, 2011; Pantazi et al, 2021; Pennycook et al, 2018 for a critical review).…”

Section: Cognitive Processes Of (Ideological) Belief Formation and Up...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Misinformation Receptivity Framework

Zmigrod

Burnell

Hameleers

2023

European Psychologist

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Evaluating the truthfulness of new information is a difficult and complex task. Notably, there is currently no unified theoretical framework that addresses the questions of (1) how individuals discern whether political information is true or (deliberately) false, (2) under what conditions individuals are most susceptible to believing misinformation, and (3) how the structure of political and communicative environments skews cognitive processes of truth, discernment, and interpretation generation. To move forward, we propose the Misinformation Receptivity Framework (MRF). Building on Bayesian and probabilistic models of cognition, the MRF suggests that we can conceptualize misinformation receptivity as a cognitive inference problem in which the reliability of incoming misinformation is weighed against the reliability of prior beliefs. This “reliability-weighting” process can model when individuals adopt or reject misinformation, as well as the ways in which they creatively generate interpretations rather than passively discern truth versus falsehood. Moreover, certain communication contexts can lead people to rely excessively on incoming (mis)information or conversely to rely excessively on prior beliefs. The MRF postulates how such environmental properties can heighten the persuasiveness of different kinds of misinformation. For instance, the MRF predicts that noisy communication contexts, in which the reliability of inputs is ambiguous, make people susceptible to highly partisan and ideological misinformation or disinformation that amplifies their existing belief systems. By contrast, the MRF predicts that contextual instability renders people susceptible to misinformation that would be considered extreme or worldview-incongruent in conditions of stability. The MRF formally delineates the interactions between cognitive and communicative mechanisms, offering insights and testable hypotheses on when, how, and why different kinds of misinformation proliferate.

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“…Or consider, for example, the phenomenon of belief perseverance, in which subjects form beliefs from (false) reports and then continue to believe many of those things even after subjects acknowledge the discrediting of the evidence on which they initially formed their beliefs (Ross & Anderson, 1982). And it seems that the political context is no exception: people are prone to believing anything that they read (Pantazi et al, 2021).…”

Section: The Preference For Belief and Motivated Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The preference for belief, issue polarization, and echo chambers

Baumgaertner

Justwan

2022

Synthese

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Some common explanations of issue polarization and echo chambers rely on social or cognitive mechanisms of exclusion. Accordingly, suggested interventions like “be more open-minded” target these mechanisms: avoid epistemic bubbles and don’t discount contrary information. Contrary to such explanations, we show how a much weaker mechanism—the preference for belief—can produce issue polarization in epistemic communities with little to no mechanisms of exclusion. We present a network model (with an empirically-validated structure) that demonstrates how a dynamic interaction between the preference for belief and common structures of epistemic communities can turn very small unequal distributions of initial beliefs into full-blown polarization. This points to a different class of explanations, one that emphasizes the importance of the initial spread of information. We also show how our model complements extant explanations by including a version of biased assimilation and motivated reasoning—cognitive mechanisms of exclusion. We find that mechanisms of exclusion can exacerbate issue polarization, but may not be the ultimate root of it. Hence, the recommended interventions suggested by extant literature is expected to be limited and the problem of issue polarization to be even more intractable.

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Social and Cognitive Aspects of the Vulnerability to Political Misinformation

Cited by 25 publications

References 265 publications

(Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?

(Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?

The Misinformation Receptivity Framework

The preference for belief, issue polarization, and echo chambers

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