The Influence of Traits Associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on the Detection of Fake News

Abstract

A small-scale exploratory study was conducted to investigate whether students with traits associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were more or less accurate in spotting different types of fake news. A non-clinical sample of university students completed an online identification task, where both fake and real articles items were manipulated in terms of their emotive content. When individuals with low and high scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) were compared, there were no significant main effects on detection accuracy. However, there were two significant interactions, indicating an interesting relationship between message emotiveness, ASD and fake news detection. The results contribute to an understanding of how individual differences, in particular ASD, affect judgements of news and will contribute to tailoring education regarding features of fake news.