Skip to main content

“If this account is true it is most enormously wonderful”

Today's post is by Sacha Altay, Emma de Araujo and Hugo Mercier.

Sacha Altay is doing his PHD thesis at the Jean Nicod Institute on misinformation from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective. Emma de Araujo is a master student in Sociology doing an internship at the Jean Nicod Institute in the Evolution and Social Cognition Team. Hugo Mercier is a research scientist at the CNRS (Jean Nicod Institute) working on argumentation and how we evaluate communicated information. 


Why do people share fake news? We believe others to be more easily swayed by fake news than us (Corbu et al., 2020; Jang & Kim, 2018), thus an intuitive explanation is that people share fake news because they are gullible. It makes sense that if people can’t tell truths from falsehoods, they will inadvertently share falsehoods often enough. In fact, laypeople are quite good at detecting fake news (Pennycook et al., 2019, 2020; Pennycook & Rand, 2019) and, more generally, they don’t get fooled easily (Mercier, 2020). However, despite this ability to spot fake news, people do share some news they suspect to be inaccurate (Pennycook et al., 2019, 2020). Why would they do that?


 

One explanation is that people share inaccurate information by mistake, because they are lazy or distracted (Pennycook et al., 2019; Pennycook & Rand, 2019). Indeed, a rational mind should only share accurate information, right? Not so fast. First, laypeople are not professional journalists, they share news for a variety of reasons, such as bonding with peers or having a laugh. Second, even when one’s goal is to inform others, accuracy alone is not enough.

How informative do you find the following (true) news “This morning a pigeon attacked my plants”? Now consider these fake news stories “COVID-19 is a bioweapon released by China” and “Drinking alcohol protects from COVID-19.” If true, the first one might start another world war, and the second one would end the pandemic in a massive and unprecedent international booze-up. Despite being implausible, as long as one is not entirely sure that such fake news is inaccurate, it has some relevance and sharing value.



In a recent article, we tested whether, as suggested above, the “interestingness-if-true” of a piece of information can in part make up for its questionable accuracy. In two pre-registered experiments, we had 600 online participants rating how willing they would be to share a series of true and fake news, and rate how accurate and interesting-if-true the pieces of news were. Participants were more willing to share news they found interesting-if-true, or accurate.


In addition, fake news was deemed much less accurate than true news but also more interesting-if-true.

 

 


Our results suggest that people may not share fake news because they are gullible, distracted or lazy, but instead because fake news has qualities that make up for its relative inaccuracy, such as being more interesting-if-true. Yet people likely share news they think might not be accurate for a nexus of reasons beside its interestingness-if-true (see, e.g., Kümpel et al., 2015; Petersen et al., 2018; Shin & Thorson, 2017). For instance, older adults share more fake news than younger adults despite being better than them at detecting fake news, probably because “older adults often prioritize interpersonal goals over accuracy” (Brashier & Schacter, 2020, p. 4).

In the end, we should keep in mind that (i) being accurate is not the same thing as being interesting: accuracy is only one part of relevance; (ii) sharing is not the same thing as believing, people share things they don’t necessarily hold to be true; (iii) sharing information is a social behavior motivated by a myriad of factors, and informing others is only one of them.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.
Read more

Motivated Reasoning in Science

Today's post is by Josh May (University of Alabama, Birmingham). In this post, he talks about one of his papers published in Synthese and entitled " Bias in Science ". Josh May Much discussion of the replication crisis in science has focused on the social sciences, particularly psychology. A common narrative is that the social sciences are particularly susceptible to powerful biases, such as moral and political ideology. I argue instead for a parity thesis: all areas of science are subject to bias, through the general psychological mechanism of motivated reasoning . This provides a unified framework for understanding how values influence the entire scientific enterprise. The scientific process involves numerous decisions that can be influenced by one's values--including moral, political, and prudential values--which manifest as goals or motivations. A researcher wants badly, say, to publish in a prestigious journal in order to either advance her career or maintain ...
Read more

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...
Read more