The Psychology of Fake News

[Slide 1]
This presentation provides a rapid summary of the psychology behind the proliferation and acceptance of fake news and misinformation.
My name is Charlotte Webber, I’m a PhD Candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Edinburgh and I gained both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK. As a research student, finding credible sources and fact-checking my information is something I’ve become well accustomed to and I would consider myself reasonably competent at spotting fake – or at least questionable – information. But misinformation is out there and sometimes it is so easy to get hooked by a click-bait headline, to fail to seek out counter-arguments to information that confirms my own opinions or to get lazy about fact-checking. So, I did a bit of digging into the psychology behind why we fall for fake news and what we might be able to do about it.

[Slide 2]
The Cambridge dictionary defines fake news as “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke”. This underlines an important point that although the term ‘fake’ news is often associated with malicious intent, it can sometimes be represented as satire or comedy. Similarly, information may be inaccurate simply because it has been poorly reported or not sufficiently fact-checked. Regardless of the intent however, fake news and misleading information has the power to influence politics and has often more recently described as ‘a threat to democracy’.

[Slide 3]
The term ‘fake news’ has really come into public consciousness in the last few years, no thanks to a certain U.S. president and his accusations against public media outlets. However, instances of the public being misled by media reporting are not new.
For example, in 1853 the New York Sun published an article announcing the discovery of life on the moon. A famous astronomer, Sir John Herschel, was said to have found evidence of life forms on the moon, including unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats. Although intended as satire, readers – including a committee of scientists from Yale university – were completely taken in and the Sun had to admit the articles were a hoax a few weeks later.
You might also be familiar with the radio production of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, a dramatic dystopian production by Orson Welles which narrated an alien invasion of Earth. The drama played out like a breaking news story and reportedly tricked some of its listeners into believing that a Martian invasion was actually taking place. I can only imagine how terrifying that must have been.
A final example is the well-known Flat Earth theory. This is, of course, the theory that the Earth is not a 3-dimensional orb, but in fact flat. The modern flat earth movement originated some time in the mid-1800s and is characterised by scepticism of scientific evidence, and of the U.S. government and NASA in particular. Flat earth societies and publications disseminate information which they believe confirms their assertion that the earth is flat. For example, one Canadian philosopher, Leo Ferrari, claimed to have nearly fallen off “the Edge” of the Earth at Brimstone Head on Fogo Island in Canada.
[Slide 4]
These examples of fake news are, at best humorous, and at worst, a bit disconcerting for those taken in by them. But in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic, the consequences of fake news and misinformation have proved far more severe. From the outset, conspiracy theories regarding the origin of the virus and the necessity for mask-wearing and social-distancing flooded social media. More recently, vaccine misinformation has surged as vaccination programmes begin to be rolled-out globally. The most recent wave of infections in India has been met not only with resource shortages, but with fake news regarding the safety of the vaccine discouraging people from receiving it.

[Slide 5]
But why do people fall for fake news? Pennycook and Rand have produced a fantastic report which outlines a number of reasons why consumers are likely to believe fake news stories.
The first is emotional saliency. Fake news often tries to promote shock, fear, moral outrage or anger in an attempt to reel readers in. Outlets which work on pay-per-click models want to maximize the number of visitors to their site and so use emotionally salient headlines capture our attention. Inciting an emotional reaction seems important to the ‘believability’ of a story too – with people who report feeling stronger emotions, positive or negative, prior to reading a false news story to be more likely to believe it.
Secondly, the extent to which people engage reasoning skills when consuming information affects how likely they are to correctly judge its credibility. This makes sense, the more deeply you are thinking about whether or not a news story is accurate, the better you are likely to be at rejecting or accepting its contents. An important caveat here however is the amount of prior knowledge people have. If you know a lot about a subject and then read a piece of information about it that you know categorically to be false based on your own background knowledge, it is easy to reject the information as false. Without this background knowledge, you have nothing to judge this new information against and so reasoning might not be so helpful.
Thirdly, familiarity with a story increases the likelihood that it will be believed. This has been termed the ‘illusory truth effect’ and is similar to another psychological phenomenon you may have heard about, the ‘mere exposure effect’. Both of these phenomena illustrate the fact that simply having greater exposure to a particular subject, even if you don’t interact with it, and providing that you don’t have negative interactions with it, makes you feel more favorably about it. In the case of fake news, this is true even if the information itself is extremely implausible.
A further reason why people might fall for fake news is source credibility, or indeed, perceived source credibility. If you have a research background you might know that there are good sources and bad sources of information. Good sources are peer-reviewed publications, especially those published in journals with high impact factors or by authors with reputable backgrounds and appropriate credentials. Bad sources are blog posts from random people on the internet, social media posts and my next-door neighbor. Believing that a source is credible increases the likelihood that the information they provide will be believed. It’s important to note too that often people don’t even consider checking who the source of their information is, let alone establishing whether or not they are reliable.
Finally, believing fake news may be to do with what has been termed ‘identity-protective cognition’. This is the assertion that people are more likely to believe information which is consistent with their own identity, or with a group identity, than information which disconfirms it. People are motivated to protect their identity and seek to validate them via their behavioral choices – accepting information that undermines valued or salient aspects of our identity is difficult and may underlie why we are more inclined to believe information that fits with our identity and beliefs.

[Slide 6]
So, what happens once we have taken on a piece of false information and believe it to be true? Can that be undone?
Trevors notes how the first step in this process is defining what it means to ‘correct’ misinformation. They suggest that correcting misinformation should be considered a revision of original misconceptions by integrating correct information into [people’s] knowledge structures”. In other words, hitting ‘delete’ on the fake news and replacing it with truth. However, how reasonable an expectation this is remains unclear. Wood and Porter found that across 10,000 participants, factual updating was successful in 90% of cases across 52 potentially controversial items, such as abortion rights and gun violence. This is very promising! However, Prasad and colleagues found misconceptions regarding 9/11 to be much more stable in their participant pool, with only 2% of corrective updating observed even after in-depth interviews where participants were presented with substantial challenges to their misbelief. Prasad and colleagues concluded that for select samples, in this case, those who identified as strongly partisan Republican, the refutation of personally relevant information may rarely result in correctional updating and typically lead to biased reasoning to protect their original misconception. Worse still, Nyhan and Reifer have provided evidence that challenging misconceptions with refutations may actually strengthen the original false belief. They argue that this ‘backfire effect’ may be due to the challenges activating supporting background knowledge which bolsters the misconception resulting in an ‘intentional resistance’ to new, disconfirming information.