Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking

Abstract

Objective Fake news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate beliefs have been propagated via social media. We investigate the psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. Method We recruited 1,606 participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for three online surveys. Results The tendency to ascribe profundity to randomly generated sentences—pseudo‐profound bullshit receptivity—correlates positively with perceptions of fake news accuracy, and negatively with the ability to differentiate between fake and real news (media truth discernment). Relatedly, individuals who overclaim their level of knowledge also judge fake news to be more accurate. We also extend previous research indicating that analytic thinking correlates negatively with perceived accuracy by showing that this relationship is not moderated by the presence/absence of the headline’s source (which has no effect on accuracy), or by familiarity with the headlines (which correlates positively with perceived accuracy of fake and real news). Conclusion Our results suggest that belief in fake news may be driven, to some extent, by a general tendency to be overly accepting of weak claims. This tendency, which we refer to as reflexive open‐mindedness, may be partly responsible for the prevalence of epistemically suspect beliefs writ large.

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“…Indeed, an abundance of evidence suggests that individuals assume they are being informed of the truth and are bad at identifying lies and misinformation (e.g., Bond & DePaulo, 2006;Levine, Park, & McCornack, 1999). This suggests that an over-reliance on intuition -and, specifically, having a reflexively open-minded thinking style (Pennycook & Rand, 2019c) -is likely to result in people being more susceptible to believing fake news. As we find, inducing emotional, intuitive reasoning does in fact increase the propensity to believe fake news stories.…”

“…Moreover, analytic thinking is associated with lower trust in fake news sources (Pennycook & Rand, 2019b). 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, 2020).…”

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

“…Another preventative approach involves subtle prompts that nudge people to consider accuracy. Evidence suggests that deliberation is associated with [134][135][136] and causes 137 reduced belief in false news headlines that circulated on social media. Platforms could nudge users to think about accuracy by, for example, periodically asking users to rate the accuracy of randomly selected posts.…”

“Who said it?” How contextual information influences perceived profundity of meaningful quotes and pseudo‐profound bullshit

“…On a more behavioral note, individuals high on bullshit receptivity were less likely to engage in prosocial behavior (e.g., to volunteer for a charity; Erlandsson, Nilsson, Tinghög, & Västfjäll, 2018). Finally, the paradigm of individual differences in pseudo-profound bullshit research was also extended by investigating the association with political attitudes: support for Republicans and conservatism (Pfattheicher & Schindler, 2016), neoliberalism (Sterling, Jost, & Pennycook, 2016), and proneness to fake news (Pennycook & Rand, 2018) or ideology in general (Nilsson, Erlandsson, & Västfjäll, 2019). However, given that previous research has yielded many similar findings, we suggest that changing the line of research might be more fruitful.…”