A 2018 paper from Andrew Guess of Princeton University, Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College, and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter is among the first to offer insights about Americans who actively sought out false news before and after the 2016 presidential election. According to their study, an estimated 27.4 percent of US adults — about one in four — visited an article, on a false news site, that supported either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. People saw an average of 5.45 articles from false news sites between October 7 and November 14, 2016.
Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler also found that false news consumption was concentrated among a small subset of Americans. Nearly six in 10 visits to false news sources were from the 10 percent of people with the most-conservative information diets.
Another key, potentially surprising, takeaway from that study: “In general, fake news consumption seems to be a complement to, rather than a substitute for, hard news — visits to fake news websites are highest among people who consume the most hard news and do not measurably decrease among the most politically knowledgeable individuals.”
That finding raises this question: Why would hard-news junkies also seek out false news? For some, it may be a matter of curiosity, their interest piqued by an alarming headline or a sensational photo. But some people believe the information they find on false news sites, even when it’s not backed by established facts or scientific evidence.
Why do people believe false information?
Scholars have known for decades that people tend to search for and believe information that confirms what they already think is true. The new elements are social media and the global networks of friends who use it. People let their guard down on online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where friends, family members, and coworkers share photos, gossip, and a wide variety of other information. That’s one reason why people may fall for false news, as S. Shyam Sundar, a Pennsylvania State University communication professor, explains in The Conversation. Another reason: People are less skeptical of information they encounter on platforms they have personalized — through friend requests and “liked” pages, for instance — to reflect their interests and identity.
Sundar characterizes his research findings in this way: “We discovered that participants who had customized their news portal were less likely to scrutinize the fake news and more likely to believe it.”
A growing body of research also indicates that repeated exposure to false statements can lead people to believe those falsehoods. An experimental study, led by Vanderbilt University assistant professor of psychology Lisa Fazio, showed that people sometimes are more likely to believe repeated untrue facts than even their own knowledge about a topic. For example, even after study participants had answered correctly that the short pleated skirt worn by Scots is called a kilt, their chances of believing the false statement “A sari is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots” increased after they read that sentence multiple times.
Similarly, a study forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General shows that readers who had been exposed to a made-up headline were more likely to believe it was true when they saw it again. Even when a headline is presented with a warning that the facts it conveys are in dispute, readers continue to believe the headline if they’ve had prior exposure to it.
If people believe false news to be true, they might freely share it. That’s why researchers are investigating methods to prevent its dissemination.
How can the spread of false information be stopped?
In some parts of the U.S., officials are promoting news literacy programs as a way to help Americans better assess the quality of online content. It’s too soon to tell, though, whether that could change bad habits over the long term.
Research offers a mixed view of the effectiveness of fact-checking or trying to correct bad information as a remedy.
Nyhan, of Dartmouth, and Reifler, of the University of Exeter, found that correcting information can backfire. In their well-cited 2010 study, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” they found that people sometimes hold more firmly to false beliefs when confronted with factual information. For example, when political conservatives were presented with correct information about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they were even more likely to believe Iraq had those weapons.
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