The Psychology of Fake News
Name
1-s2.0-S1364661321000516-main.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.48 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
98cccb79b4a6e1d2261cea1b8738d141
Author(s)
Pennycook, Gordon
Rand, David G
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Pennycook, Gordon and Rand, David G. 2021. "The Psychology of Fake News." Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25 (5).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We synthesize a burgeoning literature investigating why people believe and share false or highly misleading news online. Contrary to a common narrative whereby politics drives susceptibility to fake news, people are ‘better’ at discerning truth from falsehood (despite greater overall belief) when evaluating politically concordant news. Instead, poor truth discernment is associated with lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, and the use of heuristics such as familiarity. Furthermore, there is a substantial disconnect between what people believe and what they share on social media. This dissociation is largely driven by inattention, more so than by purposeful sharing of misinformation. Thus, interventions can successfully nudge social media users to focus more on accuracy. Crowdsourced veracity ratings can also be leveraged to improve social media ranking algorithms.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.TICS.2021.02.007
