The Psychology of Fake News

Accepting, Sharing, and Correcting Misinformation

Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela Jaffe, Eryn Newman, Norbert Schwarz, Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela Jaffe, Eryn Newman, Norbert Schwarz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000179057
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign.

Dealing with misinformation is important in many areas of daily life, including politics, the marketplace, health communication, journalism, education, and science. In a general climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, this book asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis)information, and what can be done to counter misinformation? All three of these aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. The contributions within this volume summarize the most up-to-date empirical findings, theories, and applications and discuss cutting-edge ideas and future directions of interventions to counter fake news.

Also providing guidance on how to handle misinformation in an age of "alternative facts", this is a fascinating and vital reading for students and academics in psychology, communication, and political science and for professionals including policy makers and journalists.

1
WHAT IS NEW AND TRUE¹ ABOUT FAKE NEWS?

Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela E. Jaffé, Eryn J. Newman, and Norbert Schwarz

Following Brexit and the 2016 US presidential campaign, the Oxford Dictionary selected “post-truth” as the Word of the Year 2016, which the dictionary defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford-Dictionary, 2016). A year later, the Collins Dictionary designated “fake news” as the Collins Word of the Year 2017 in response to a 365% increase in its usage in the Collins corpus of the English language (Collins-Dictionary, 2017). As the dissemination of fake news flourished and became a topic of public discourse and concern, designating something as fake news became another tool in the repertoire of political propaganda. From US president Donald Trump accusing journalists and mainstream media of spreading fake news about him (e.g., Pengelly, 2017) to the mainstream media tracking fake news spread by Donald Trump (Kessler, Rizzo, & Kelly, 2019), and the German party AFD (Alternative für Deutschland) returning to the Nazi term Lügenpresse (lying press) to describe mainstream media, accusations of spreading fake news has become a daily occurrence. Against the background of this general climate, the present volume presents insights into fake news from multiple scientific disciplines and perspectives.

What is fake news and what is misinformation?

Fake news can be defined as “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting” (Collins-Dictionary, 2017). Analyses of Google searches indicate that, prior to 2016, the term was used to locate satirical news, as offered by the satirical print magazine The Onion and the satirical television show The Daily Show. By the end of 2016, the use had shifted to searches pertaining to the US presidential election, Donald Trump, Twitter, and CNN (Cunha, Magno, Caetano, Teixeira, & Almeida, 2018). The dissemination of false information under the guise of news reporting had become serious business.

What sets fake news apart from news reports that are merely false is the intention to deceive. As the Council of Europe (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017) noted, the public discussion of fake news often subsumes disinformation, misinformation, and mal-information. The term “disinformation” refers to false information that is created to harm a person, social group, organization, or country, whereas “misinformation” is merely false but not intended to harm. Because intention to harm is often difficult to determine, the term “misinformation” is also used for false information in general and the contributions to this volume follow this usage. Of course, harm can also be achieved by spreading factually correct information with harmful implications – for example, by leaking factually true private information that should not have any bearing on public issues – a type of information that is sometimes referred to as “mal-information”. All of these classes of information are more influential when the information is accepted as true and is shared with others. Once accepted, false information is very difficult to correct and can continue to influence related beliefs even when people no longer endorse the false information that gave rise to those beliefs (for a review, see Lewandowsky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz, & Cook, 2012). The contributions to the present volume focus on the processes involved in accepting, sharing, and correcting false information.

In the public discourse, the term “fake news” is usually associated with the political realm, but fake news stories are not confined to it; fabricated information is disseminated in all areas, perhaps most prominently in the domains of consumer products, health, and finances. But even reputable scientific journals are not free of fake news in the form of deliberately deceptive reports based on manipulated or freely invented data (Bar-Ilan & Halevi, 2020).

Fake news has gained public attention for several reasons. First, misinformation has become part of everyday life (see Lyons, Merola, & Reifler, 2020). For instance, Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) estimated that the average US-American adult has consumed one to three pieces of fake news in the months prior to the 2016 US presidential election and the fact checkers of the Washington Post reported that President Trump made 10,796 false or misleading claims in the first 869 days of his presidency (Kessler et al., 2019). Furthermore, Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral (2018) found in analyses of Twitter data that false information is retweeted more rapidly and more often than true information, particularly news on politics.

Second, to the extent that people believe misinformation and act upon it, fake news can have serious consequences. To illustrate, during what has become known as Pizzagate (Wikipedia, n.d.), a piece of fake news about an alleged connection among officials of the US Democratic party, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., and human trafficking instigated a young man to “investigate” the cause himself by firing a rifle inside the restaurant. Not all direct consequences of fake news are as dramatic; but, when individuals or groups act upon disinformation, consequences may often not be to their individual, or societies-at-large, advantage.

Third, peaceful human interaction and individual as well as societal prosperity strongly depend on interpersonal trust (e.g., Greifeneder, Müller, Stahlberg, Van den Bos, & Bless, 2011). Division of labor, trade between persons and countries, as well as democracies all necessitate shared beliefs that some things are true and that agents can be relied upon. Individuals found guilty of lying are not (or to a lesser extent) believed, and companies or countries known to have violated financial promises face serious backlash. Fake news about a government has the potential to erode society’s trust and therefore constitute a threat, especially to democracies. Moreover, denouncing established newspapers, broadcasters, and journals has the potential to erode trust in those organizations that take on the role of fact checkers in modern societies. In the United States, trust in mainstream news sources showed a pronounced partisan divide at the time of the 2016 election, with 51% of Democrats but only 14% of Republicans reporting “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of trust in mainstream news source (Swift, 2016).

Brief history of fake news dissemination

The intention to deceive is as old as humankind, and systematic fake news campaigns have been documented throughout history (see Posetti & Matthews, 2018). What changed is the ability to spread misinformation quickly and efficiently to ever larger audiences. When Ramses II pretended in 1274 BC that his attempt to capture the city of Kadesch was successful, word of his fake victory had to be spread by mouth and via wall paintings. When Octavian waged a propaganda campaign against Antony in Roman times, he could smear him as a womanizer and drunk in short slogans written upon coins that allowed for a wider distribution (Kaminska, 2017). Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1493 enabled one-to-many communication on a larger scale and with it the broad dissemination of true as well as false information. In 1835, a then New York based newspaper, The Sun, published a series of articles on the discovery of humanoid life on the moon that became known as the Great Moon Hoax (Thornton, 2000). The introduction of the radio further facilitated the dissemination of any news, including extended disinformation campaigns in the lead-up to World War II (Herzstein, 1978; Kallis, 2005).

However, the systematic use of print and broadcast media, and broad dissemination of their products, required considerable resources, which limited the range of actors who could take advantage of these technologies. On the negative side, this allowed actors who enjoyed access to spread disinformation without much opposition; on the positive side, it also gave attempts to implement ethical norms of journalism a chance to shape reporting (Ward, 2015; see also the contributions in Bertrand, 2018). The introduction of the internet, followed by the development of social media, reduced the existing access barriers to the extent that most individuals are now able to participate in large-scale dissemination. With modern smartphone technology and online social networks, every internet user can be a broadcaster. To illustrate, the average Twitter user has 707 followers (Smith, 2019) to whom information can be broadcasted within split seconds. This level of reach was previously impossible for individuals, creating a fundamentally new era, where news dissemination is no longer an access-restricted privilege but available to all (internet users). Although this change has the potential to empower citizens, it also enables the uncontrolled spread of misinformation and calls for the development of new social norms of careful information evaluation and sharing.

Today, social media sites decide the newsfeed for their users by way of algorithms. In particular, companies like Facebook filter the stream of available news and present their users with a curated feed. The details of the curation algorithm are unknown to users and undergo frequent changes. What is known is that the algorithm favors information that fits the user’s profile of preferences and withholds information that does not. The resulting filter bubble (Pariser, 2011) presents largely consistent information that reinforces the user’s worldview and presents few challenges, leaving users confident that their own views are correct and the views of others at best mistaken and at worst malevolent (for a discussion, see Schwarz & Jalbert, 2020). Many observers suspect that such filter bubbles contributed to the outcome of the 2016 Brexit vote (see Oyserman & Dawson, 2020). Combined with the natural homophily of human social networks, where individuals are usually befriended with likeminded and similar others, filter mechanisms can create powerful homogeneous networks in which content that fits the members’ values and norms stands a higher chance of being communicated. Critically, information shared within such bubbles may travel like a piece of sound in an echo chamber, allowing isolated voices to sound like a chorus.

Further adding to the dissemination efficiency of social media is that agents in the information sharing game no longer need to be human. Social bots can generate, share, redistribute, and like content with little or no human guidance or interaction. This affects the content, amount, and qualification (liking) of information, and may strongly alter information ecologies within specific bubbles. Although Twitter, Facebook, and other networks are aiming to reduce automated accounts, this is an arms race, where those who want to deceive adapt their behavior to bypass or override the latest technology developed by those who wish to restrict the network to human agents. In the very near future, the increasing perfection of deep fakes – fake videos or photos that are enormously difficult to identify as misleading fabrications – will add further challenges to the maintenance of a credible information environment.

This volume

In a climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, the present volume asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis-) information, and what can be done to counter misinformation. All three aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. To address this set of questions, the volume brings together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas such as information sciences and political science.

This volume is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the origins and aftermath of fake news, in online social networks and academia. Lyons, Merola, and Reifler (2020) ask “How Bad Is the Fake News Problem?” and present data on perceived fake news consumption after the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States. Ackland and Gwynn (2020) provide a data-driven report on news diffusion on Twitter as a function of truth status, that is, whether the news was true or false. The authors also provide an overview on the literature of fact checking. Finally, Bar-Ilan and Halevi (2020) investigate the aftermath of retracted research contributions, especially those that originated in scientific misconduct, including data fabrication and falsification. They focus on examples from medical and biomedical sciences, given their potentially disastrous impact on public health.

The volume’s second and third sections are primarily informed by psychological research. Communication serves fundamental informational and social human needs. The ingeniousness of online social networks rests in catering to these needs, allowing humans to pass on information, to learn, to be surprised, informed, and to be in a position to evaluate content and others. In satisfying these needs, however, many motivational and cognitive processes may act like filters and distortions themselves, affecting what kind of information individuals selectively search, perceive, believe to be true, or retrieve from memory. It rema...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is new and true about fake news?
• Part I The journey and aftermath of (false) information in networks
• Part II Cognitive processes in accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation
• Part III Motivational processes in accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation
• Index