Misinformation, Cognitive Reflection, and Political Information

• In Event: Susceptibility to Fake News And Misinformation: Who and Why?

Abstract

The tension between intuitive and deliberative processes provides a perspective for thinking about why people fall for misinformation that has largely been absent from political science. In recent work, we have provided initial evidence for the utility of this framework, finding that more deliberative people are better than more intuitive people at detecting misinformation headlines taken from social media, regardless of the misinformation’s political alignment. This is, in and of itself, an important result. But as it stands, the impact of this behavioral economics-based finding is limited because it has not been integrated in the intellectual landscape of political science (from which most work on misinformation comes), with its focus on political knowledge.
We propose to build a new line of research – and to bring these ideas into the mainstream of political science – by connecting the dual process model work to prior work in political science on political knowledge and correcting misinformation. In essence, we aim to revamp the theoretical framework that is predominant in the domain of misinformation research. Political science has become focused on polarized rhetoric and processing of information. But the dual-process cognition perspective suggests that much of the problem with misinformation could be addressed by increasing people’s willingness to question their intuitions; that is, motivating them to reflect on accuracy when judging news content. In other words, accuracy-related motives could be important drivers of how people interact with the political world.

Authors

• Adam J. Berinsky

• David Rand, MIT

• Gordon Pennycook, University of Regina

• Graelyn Humiston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Ben Tappin