Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news
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Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
Open Access
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news Cameron Martel1* , Gordon Pennycook2 and David G. Rand1,3
Abstract What is the role of emotion in susceptibility to believing fake news? Prior work on the psychology of misinformation has focused primarily on the extent to which reason and deliberation hinder versus help the formation of accurate beliefs. Several studies have suggested that people who engage in more reasoning are less likely to fall for fake news. However, the role of reliance on emotion in belief in fake news remains unclear. To shed light on this issue, we explored the relationship between experiencing specific emotions and believing fake news (Study 1; N = 409). We found that across a wide range of specific emotions, heightened emotionality at the outset of the study was predictive of greater belief in fake (but not real) news posts. Then, in Study 2, we measured and manipulated reliance on emotion versus reason across four experiments (total N = 3884). We found both correlational and causal evidence that reliance on emotion increases belief in fake news: self-reported use of emotion was positively associated with belief in fake (but not real) news, and inducing reliance on emotion resulted in greater belief in fake (but not real) news stories compared to a control or to inducing reliance on reason. These results shed light on the unique role that emotional processing may play in susceptibility to fake news. Keywords: Fake news, Misinformation, Dual-process theory, Emotion, Reason Introduction The 2016 US presidential election and UK Brexit vote focused attention on the spread of “fake news” (“fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent”; Lazer et al. 2018, p. 1094) via social media. Although the fabrication of ostensible news events has been around in media such as tabloid magazines since the early twentieth century (Lazer et al. 2018), technological advances and the rise of social media provide opportunity for anyone to create a website and publish fake news that might be seen by many thousands (or even millions) of people. The threat of misinformation is perhaps most prevalent and salient within the domain of politics. For example, within the 3 months prior to the US election, estimates indicate that fake news stories favoring Trump were *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
shared approximately 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared approximately 8 million times (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). Furthermore, a recent analysis suggests that, among news stories fact-checked by independent fact-checking organizations, false stories spread farther, faster, and more broadly on Twitter than true stories, with false political stories reaching more people in a shorter period of time
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