Social Psychological Predictors of Belief in Fake News in the Run-Up to the 2019 Hungarian Elections: The Importance of Conspiracy Mentality Supports the Notion of Ideological Symmetry in Fake News Belief

Does exposure necessarily lead to misbelief? A meta-analysis of susceptibility to health misinformation

A meta-analysis was conducted to quantify the overall effect of health misinformation exposure on shaping misbelief. Aggregation of results from 28 individual randomized controlled trial studies (n = 8752) reveals a positive but small average effect, d = 0.28. Moderation analyses suggest that adults who are younger and female tend to develop higher misbelief if exposed to health misinformation. Furthermore, media platform, message falsity, and misbelief measurements also contribute to the exposure effect. These findings offer nuanced but crucial insights into existing misinformation literature, and development of more effective strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts of health misinformation.

Motivated Cognition in Cooperation

Successful cooperation is tightly linked to individuals' beliefs about their interaction partners, the decision setting, and existing norms, perceptions, and values. This article reviews and integrates findings from judgment and decision-making, social and cognitive psychology, political science, and economics, developing a systematic overview of the mechanisms underlying motivated cognition in cooperation. We elaborate on how theories and concepts related to motivated cognition developed in various disciplines define the concept and describe its functionality. We explain why beliefs play such an essential role in cooperation, how they can be distorted, and how this fosters or harms cooperation. We also highlight how individual differences and situational factors change the propensity to engage in motivated cognition. In the form of a construct map, we provide a visualization of the theoretical and empirical knowledge structure regarding the role of motivated cognition, including its many interdependencies, feedback loops, and moderating influences. We conclude with a brief suggestion for a future research agenda based on this compiled evidence.

Moral leniency towards belief-consistent disinformation may help explain its spread on social media

The spread of false and misleading information on social media is largely dependent on human action. Understanding the factors that lead social media users to amplify (or indeed intervene in) the spread of this content is an ongoing challenge. Prior research suggests that users are not only more likely to interact with misinformation that supports their ideology or their political beliefs, they may also feel it is more acceptable to spread. However, less is known about the influence of newer, issue-specific beliefs. Two online studies explored the relationship between the degree of belief-consistency of disinformation on users' moral judgements and intentions to spread disinformation further. Four disinformation narratives were presented: disinformation that supported or undermined the UK Government's handling of COVID-19, and disinformation that minimised or maximised the perceived risk of COVID-19. A novel scale for measuring intentions to contribute to the spread of social media content was also used in study 2. Participants reported greater likelihood of spreading false material that was consistent with their beliefs. More lenient moral judgements related to the degree of belief-consistency with disinformation, even when participants were aware the material was false or misleading. These moral judgements partially mediated the relationship between belief-consistency of content and intentions to spread it further on social media. While people are concerned about the spread of disinformation generally, they may evaluate belief-consistent disinformation differently from others in a way that permits them to spread it further. As social media platforms prioritise the ordering of feeds based on personal relevance, there is a risk that users could be being presented with disinformation that they are more tolerant of.

What predicts people's belief in COVID-19 misinformation? A retrospective study using a nationwide online survey among adults residing in the United States

BACKGROUND

Tackling infodemics with flooding misinformation is key to managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet only a few studies have attempted to understand the characteristics of the people who believe in misinformation.

METHODS

Data was used from an online survey that was administered in April 2020 to 6518 English-speaking adult participants in the United States. We created binary variables to represent four misinformation categories related to COVID-19: general COVID-19-related, vaccine/anti-vaccine, COVID-19 as an act of bioterrorism, and mode of transmission. Using binary logistic regression and the LASSO regularization, we then identified the important predictors of belief in each type of misinformation. Nested vector bootstrapping approach was used to estimate the standard error of the LASSO coefficients.

RESULTS

About 30% of our sample reported believing in at least one type of COVID-19-related misinformation. Belief in one type of misinformation was not strongly associated with belief in other types. We also identified 58 demographic and socioeconomic factors that predicted people's susceptibility to at least one type of COVID-19 misinformation. Different groups, characterized by distinct sets of predictors, were susceptible to different types of misinformation. There were 25 predictors for general COVID-19 misinformation, 42 for COVID-19 vaccine, 36 for COVID-19 as an act of bioterrorism, and 27 for mode of COVID-transmission.

CONCLUSION

Our findings confirm the existence of groups with unique characteristics that believe in different types of COVID-19 misinformation. Findings are readily applicable by policymakers to inform careful targeting of misinformation mitigation strategies.