Who Believes Misinformation? A Profile of Vulnerability to False News in India

• In Event: Misinformed? Who, How, and Why

Abstract

Misinformation has deleterious effects on citizens across the world, from altering attitudes, increasing polarization, to affecting voting behavior (Jerit and Zhao 2020). But it can have an outsized impact in developing countries because of lower rates of formal education, decreased literacy, and new but unfamiliar internet users. What does the demographic profile of the average user vulnerable to misinformation in such contexts look like?

We answer this question in the context of India, a country with an exponentially-growing population of internet users and where beliefs in misinformation have led to violence, social conflict, and murder (Perrigo 2019; McLaughlin 2018). Research in American settings finds that older people, those ideologically aligned to the right-wing, and those with low levels of digital literacy are most vulnerable to falsehoods (Grinberg et al. 2019; Munger et al. 2018). But expecting these outcomes is not a forgone conclusion in the case of India, where the mechanisms for the spread of rumors, the norms that surround information sharing, and the platforms they are shared on are dissimilar from Western contexts.

In this project, we draw on data from three surveys conducted over two years in India to paint a profile of vulnerability to misinformation. Our samples cover diverse demographics, methods of sampling, time periods, and locations. Using two online studies and one face-to face survey, we show that the correlates of misinformation in India are a stark contrast from those in Western democracies. First, we find that age is negatively correlated with vulnerability to misinformation, while digital literacy is positively correlated. Further, while men and women are equally susceptible to falsehoods, men demonstrate higher levels of confidence in their views about the veracity of stories. In addition, while right and left-wing partisans are equally susceptible as well, right-wing partisans seem to have stronger tools to argue away counter-attitudinal information. In other words, they engage in partisan motivated reasoning to a greater extent and are less likely to learn from interventions designed to mitigate beliefs in misinformation. Across all our studies, education, often seen as a proxy for political sophistication (Wittenberg and Berinsky 2020), has no effect on propensity to consume false stories. Finally, moving beyond demographics, we underscore the importance of religiosity as an unexplored covariate that predicts beliefs in misinformation. Highly religious respondents are twice as likely to be vulnerable to false stories relative to less religious respondents, highlighting the link between religious beliefs and health misinformation as well as conspiracy theories scapegoating religious minorities. We demonstrate that religious motivated reasoning is an even stronger predictor than partisanship in this context.

Our results have consequential implications. Identifying the populations most vulnerable to misinformation can help academics, policymakers, and tech platforms design targeted interventions to slow its uptake. This study also aims to provoke a deeper understanding of the mechanisms for vulnerability to misinformation in developing contexts, along with a discussion of why and how these mechanisms differ from Western countries.

Authors

• Simon Chauchard, Leiden University

• Sumitra Badrinathan, University of Oxford