Unpacking Post-truth: Determinants of Political Misinformation Vulnerability

• In Event: What to Believe? Facts in a Post-truth World

Abstract

Political misinformation and truth negationism uphold polarization and distrust in democracies around the world, and have reached the tipping point of accompanying open attempts to overturn legitimate elections, as well as an overall trend of democratic backsliding. Commentators increasingly worry that truth has lost its value in public discourse, casting doubts on citizens’ ability to make appropriate political decisions.
From an individual-behavioral perspective, the key questions involve why some people tend to believe in false political information, and consider sharing it on social media. Here empirical research has produced competing findings. On the one hand, consistent with dual-process models of cognition, much research shows that directionally-biased beliefs and reliance on fast and intuitive forms of reasoning can foster misinformation acceptance and sharing (e.g., Osmundsen et al. 2021; Gawronski 2021), while accuracy-oriented reasoning – induced through nudging and media literacy interventions or characterizing individual epistemic dispositions – leads to greater resistance to false information (see Pennycook and Rand 2019, 2022; Pennycook et al., 2021; Mosleh et al. 2021). On the other hand, evidence for the identity-protective cognition thesis shows that greater cognitive ability results in greater polarization and directionally-biased reasoning (see Kahn 2013; Khan et al. 2017). Furthermore, the alleged gullibility of citizens on political matters is at odds with much research in cognitive psychology showing that individuals are well-equipped to avoid falling for misguided information (Mercier, 2020).
In this study, we propose a framework to reconcile these contradictory pieces of evidence: grounding of recent attempts to achieve integrative models of misinformation (Van Bavel et al. 2021), we present a reconceptualization of misinformation risk factors distinguishing between the situational context of belief updating (i.e., varying stakes in opinion formation, focusing capacity, and issue politicization), and dispositional individual tendencies (i.e., varying cognitive reflection, political identity, and political sophistication).
First, we posit that situational and dispositional factors can lead people to express beliefs as personal opinions (subjective statements about how they evaluate an issue), or as truth judgments (objective statements about factual properties of the issue in the external world). People have a general preference for self-disclosure, especially on social media (Bazarova & Choi, 2014; Tamir & Mitchell, 2012), so they might use political issues to satisfy their needs for self-expression.
Second, we disclose the critical role played by the situation where information processing occurs, contrasting low-stakes environments – where being wrong will not have high psychological or material costs – to high-stakes environments. In particular, we posit that in low-stakes environments, when individuals state their own beliefs about a news (e.g. by answering a survey question or sharing the news with their peers) they are in fact expressing their own opinion, rather than making an actual truth judgment. In this view, the prevalence and spread of misinformation that we observe is just a manifestation of "simple" opinion polarization, facilitated by an environment in which talk is cheap.

We investigate the theorized mechanisms empirically using randomized experiments. Results of a pre-registered survey experiment show that it is possible to trigger different types of evaluation by manipulating the way in which belief in a political news headline is asked: when people are asked whether the news is "plausible" (a wording which aims at maximizing the expressions of one's own views) they tend to show greater partisan bias than when they are asked whether the news is "true", or whether they would bet money on its truthfulness (an analysis of response times shows that, in the latter condition, they also take longer to evaluate the news). A second study shows that rating a news headline as “plausible” is more important for the willingness to share it than rating it “true”, and this is particularly true when the sharing occurs in one’s own interpersonal networks (compared to sharing it on social media). We discuss the potential implications of our framework, and potential further designs or replications of the existing studies.

Authors

• Moreno Mancosu, University of Turin

• Federico Vegetti, University of Turin

• Andrea De Angelis, University of Zurich