Abstract
The proliferation of fake news on social media is now a matter of considerable public and governmental concern. In 2016, the UK EU referendum and the US Presidential election were both marked by social media misinformation campaigns, which have subsequently reduced trust in democratic processes. More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the acceptance of fake news has been shown to pose a threat to public health. Research on how to combat the false acceptance of fake news is still in its infancy. However, recent studies have started to focus on the psychological factors which might make some individuals less likely to fall for fake news. Here, we adopt that approach to assess whether individuals who show high levels of ‘emotional intelligence’ (EQ) are less likely to fall for fake news items. That is, are individuals who are better able to disregard the emotionally charged content of such items, better equipped to assess the veracity of the information. Using a sample of UK participants, an established measure of EQ and a novel fake news detection task, we report a significant positive relationship between individual differences in emotional intelligence and fake news detection ability. We also report a similar effect for higher levels of educational attainment, and we report some exploratory qualitative fake news judgement data. Our findings are discussed in terms of their applicability to practical short term (i.e. current Facebook user data) and medium term (i.e. emotional intelligence training) interventions which could enhance fake news detection.
Highlights
The dissemination of misinformation has always been a feature of society [1,2,3,4]
We adopt that approach to assess whether individuals who show high levels of ‘emotional intelligence’ (EQ) are less likely to fall for fake news items
The midpoint score for the detection task, which would be indicative of ‘don’t know’ responses was 72, and as seen in Table 1, overall detection scores were 61. This confirms that our item manipulation was successful, and while the task, like real world fake news detection, was challenging, participants were more likely to correctly detect the fake news items than not
Summary
The dissemination of misinformation has always been a feature of society [1,2,3,4]. the ubiquity and potential damage that such misinformation, or ‘fake news’, can have, has been elevated significantly by the emergence of social media platforms such as Facebook, which engages a global audience [5]. Fake content captures attention and spreads rapidly in comparison to real news [14], and such items often employ emotionally charged language [15]. Research suggests that such emotional content could be one of the key factors which prevents social media users from engaging in a critical assessment of the core message [16,17]. One psychological concept, known as ‘emotional intelligence’ (EQ) [18,19], could attenuate this effect, and in this paper we assess whether users who exhibit higher levels of emotional intelligence are better able to detect and discard fake news content
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