Social Mechanisms of Disinformation Perception: Social Norms and Anti-elitism

• In Event: Experimental Research on Partisan Polarisation and Misinformation

Abstract

Despite being an ever-existing issue of communication, disinformation recently gained wide attention for its possible negative consequences on modern democracies. While there is extensive and increasing research on this phenomenon, much of this existing work focuses on cognitive mechanisms and experimental manipulations. On the other hand, the main aim of this project is that of mapping (instead of manipulating) the existing cognitive and, crucially, social mechanisms. With the use of an online survey experiment where participants will evaluate a list of news, this paper firstly aims at finding correlational evidence of a link between anti-elitism and disinformation beliefs. Secondly, participants will be asked about their normative and empirical expectations regarding the importance of accurately sharing (fake) news. Thirdly, a treatment in the form of a priming message will be used to assess if these social norms can be changed and with what results.
The current project also aims at making important methodological contributions. Almost all quantitative research studies on fake news concern only the USA. We aim at generalizing our conclusions past USA, by replicating the same survey experiment in the Italian context. Furthermore, with the objective of connecting stated beliefs with observed behaviours, participants will have the possibility to provide their Twitter username in exchange for an additional economic compensation.
The survey experiment will be conducted on a representative sample of around 1200 social media users from the US and it will be replicated on a similar sample of Italian social media users. Both samples will be provided by Qualtrics.

Authors

• Fabio Torreggiani, University of Milan

• Aron Szekely