Effects of Attention and Congruence on Judging True and False COVID-19 News Headlines

Abstract

ake news has become increasingly prevalent in the United States, especially during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. since March 2020. This has caused a significant number of Americans to believe that COVID-19 is a hoax rather than a real problem. Fake news spreads easily and quickly through social media, where people are often inundated with advertisements and thumbnails of false headlines along with pseudo-reliable media outlets. The purpose of the current study is to analyze how divided attention and the congruence of news headlines and news sources affect the identification of true and false news headlines about the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants (N = 27) saw 48 news headlines paired with 48 sources and judged the validity of the headline. In the congruent condition, true and false headlines were paired with reliable and unreliable sources. In the incongruent condition, these pairings were mixed up: true headlines were accompanied by unreliable sources, and false headlines reliable sources. In 24 out of 48 trials, participants also did mental math problems while evaluating the news (divided attention). The results showed that when dividing attention, participants performed better in trials either with congruently matched headlines and sources or with incongruent matchings of false headlines and reliable sources. There were also unexpected patterns of results, which are further discussed along with some methodological revisions for future research. Keywords: attention, congruence, news media, social media, coronavirus