Fake news travels fast. But why does anyone actually believe it? It has been widely assumed that fake news spreads because we like to believe stories that confirm our world view.
But of more than 3000聽people suggests otherwise, finding that whether you believe a headline 鈥� fake or otherwise 鈥� has more to do with your ability to resist mental shortcuts.
Humans are well known for avoiding thinking whenever possible. Unconscious, automatic thinking is fast, effortless and intuitive and allows us to be thrifty with our limited mental resources. The downside is that it also fuels our tendency to jump to conclusions and fail to challenge unhelpful stereotypes. Effortful, deliberative thinking can help us question our biases, but research has shown that it can also be used to shore up polarised views on .
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Psychologists David Rand of MIT Sloan School of Management and Gordon Pennycook of University of Regina Hill-Levene School of Business wanted to know whether people believe fake news because of deliberate ignorance or whether they are not simply not stopping to think.
Think more
To find out they rated volunteers on a scale called the , which measures the tendency to challenge gut reactions. They then showed them Facebook posts showing headlines for three kinds of headlines: real news, fake news that bolstered their political viewpoint, and fake news that contradicted them. Each person was asked to rate how accurate they thought each of the stories were.
They found that people who were more reflective were better able to differentiate between real and fake news, regardless of whether the headline agreed with their politics. People who were less reflective, though, were more likely to believe everything they read.
鈥淲e don鈥檛 find any evidence of people wanting to talk themselves into believing crazy stuff,鈥� says Rand. 鈥淭his suggests that falling for fake news is more about inattention.鈥�
But this doesn鈥檛 have anything to do with a person鈥檚 general intelligence. 鈥淭he tendency to engage in thinking is different from your thinking abilities,鈥� says Rand. 鈥淲hen you stop to think you might come up with the right answer or the wrong answer, but do you bother to think about it in the first place?鈥�
The good news is that this might make the problem easier to tackle. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 have to get people to get less partisan and give up their biases, it鈥檚 much simpler 鈥� you just need to get people to think a little bit more,鈥� says Rand.
Social media platforms could help by reminding people about accuracy or by asking them how accurate they think a story is, he suggests.
Cognition
