Uncommon Errors: Adaptive Intuitions in High-Quality Media Environments Increase Susceptibility to Misinformation

Abstract

Belief in misinformation has been linked in part to digital media environments promoting reliance on intuition -- which in turn has been shown to increase belief in falsehoods. Here we propose that this apparently irrational behavior may actually result from ecologically rational adaptations to complex environments. In a large survey experiment, we test whether intuitive belief in misinformation may result from these rational adaptations by randomizing participants to be shown either a largely true or largely false news feed. We show that individuals make more frequent and quicker errors on the less common headline type, and less frequent errors on the more common headline type. After seeing many true headlines, a participant is more likely to misidentify a subsequent false headline as true, and vice versa after seeing many false headlines. This pattern is consistent with adaptation to the proportion of true and false content (the veracity base rate). We use computational modeling to show that these differences are driven by intuitions, which correspond to Bayesian priors, about the veracity of the content -- intuitions which then spill over into new environments. Our results, when paired with the observation that the news consumed by most Americans is overwhelmingly true, suggest that belief in misinformation and the intuitions that underlie it are not necessarily a failing of humans in digital environments but can be a byproduct of rational adaptations to them.

A Unified Framework for Understanding and Intervening on False News Sharing

“…Here we applied drift diffusion modeling (DDM). In doing so, we are among the first to reveal the choice processes underlying news sharing behavior (see Lin et al, 2023;Orchinik et al, 2023). We first consider participants' overall news sharing tendency (across true and false news) before the interventions (at baseline).…”

“…News sharing behavior in our task was simulated and we used half true and half false news trials, which may differ from real-world experiences and veracity base rates (Orchinik et al, 2023).…”

Blatantly false news increases belief in news that is merely implausible

“…Would the effects of blatantly implausible headlines on judgments of plausibility persist even in a more realistic environment, in which plausibility and truth were correlated? To test this, we reanalyzed data from Orchinik et al (13).…”

“…While recent work has shown that prior exposure to the same false story can make that story more believable (9)(10)(11), it is not clear whether exposure to one set of implausible claims in news could make other, unrelated stories seem more or less plausible by contrast. On the one hand, a high prevalence of implausible news stories could make consumers more generally skeptical, falling for fewer inaccurate headlines while also disbelieving accurate ones (12,13). Such an assimilation effect would converge with similar work on the role of prevalence in perceptual signal detection (14), in which a high prevalence of signals (in this case, implausible news stories) can make them easier to accurately recognize.…”

“…In Studies 2, 3a, and 3b, the headlines were taken from actual news coverage, and had been previously determined to be true or false by a popular fact-checking website. Finally, to measure the effects of changing the prevalence for an individual within the same session, and to quantify dosage effects of prevalence, Study 4 reanalyzes data from Orchinik et al (13), which used a similar paradigm to Studies 1-3b to investigate a different research question.…”