Time Pressure Reduces Misinformation Discrimination Ability But Does Not Alter Response Bias

Abstract

Evidence is accumulating that parts of our social lives are speeding up, a phenomenon known as social acceleration. The implications of social acceleration for people's ability to judge the veracity of online content, and ultimately for the spread of misinformation, are largely unclear. We examined the effects of accelerated online dynamics, operationalised as time pressure, on online misinformation evaluation. Participants judged the veracity of true and false news headlines in the presence or absence of time pressure. We used signal detection theory to disentangle the effects of time pressure on discrimination ability and response bias, as well as on four key determinants of misinformation susceptibility (i.e., analytical thinking, ideological congruency, motivated reflection, and familiarity). Time pressure reduced participants' capacity to distinguish between true and false news (discrimination ability), but did not alter their tendency to classify an item as true or false (response bias). With and without time pressure, higher analytical thinking skills were associated with higher discrimination ability, whereas familiarity with a headline was associated with lower discrimination ability. As for response bias, individuals in both treatments were more likely to classify a headline as true if it was congruent with their political identity and if it was familiar. Our results highlight the dangers of social acceleration online: People are less able to accurately judge the veracity of news, while prominent drivers of misinformation susceptibility (e.g., ideological congruency, familiarity) remain influential. Interventions aimed at increasing deliberation may thus be fruitful avenues to combat the spread of online misinformation.

A framework for understanding reasoning errors: From fake news to climate change and beyond

“…As in the context of climate change, this experiment revealed that deliberation did not increase political polarization; rather, people simply rated the fake news headlines as being less accurate when given the opportunity to deliberate (and this effect was again equivalent regardless of political consistency; Bago et al, 2020a). A recent experiment relying simply on time pressure produced similar results (Sultan et al, 2022) and increasing emotionality has also been shown to increase belief in fake news (Martel et al, 2020). These studies indicate that errors in judgments of the accuracy of news headlines often emerge because of faulty intuitions that are not sufficiently intervened upon by deliberation (see also Lutzke et al, 2019).…”

“…Furthermore, although there were only slight correlations with belief in true ("real") news, people who are more analytic were better at discerning between true and false news ("overall truth discernment"; Figure 7). The association between CRT and news discernment has been replicated in dozens of studies (Bowes & Tasimi, 2022;Brashier et al, 2021;Dias et al, 2020;Guay et al, 2022;Nurse et al, 2021;Pennycook, Bear, et al, 2020;Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2021;Pennycook, McPhetres, et al, 2020;Pennycook & Rand, 2019b;Rosenzweig et al, 2021;Sultan et al, 2022;Tandoc et al, 2021) and has been extended…”

A Unified Framework for Understanding and Intervening on False News Sharing

“…In these models, we treated sharing ("not share"/"share") as a binary response variable via a probit link function and assessed overall sharing tendency ( ; sharing across true and false news) as well as sharing quality ( ; sharing true over false news). Predicting overall sharing tendency and sharing quality aligns with recent recommendations in false news research (Guay et al, 2023) and mirrors the approach used in signal detection tasks, wherein behavior is characterized by both response bias and discrimination ability (Sultan et al, 2022). We report the mean and the 95% credible interval (CI) of the posterior distribution.…”

A framework for understanding reasoning errors: From fake news to climate change and beyond

“…Furthermore, although there were only slight correlations with belief in true ("real") news, people who are more analytic were better at discerning between true and false news ("overall truth discernment"; Figure 7). The association between CRT and news discernment has been replicated in dozens of studies (Bowes & Tasimi, 2022;Brashier et al, 2021;Dias et al, 2020;Guay et al, 2022;Nurse et al, 2021;Pennycook, Bear, et al, 2020;Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2021;Pennycook, McPhetres, et al, 2020;Pennycook & Rand, 2019b;Rosenzweig et al, 2021;Sultan et al, 2022;Tandoc et al, 2021) and has been extended…”