Abstract
What is the role of emotion in susceptibility to believing fake news? Prior work on the psychology of misinformation has focused primarily on the extent to which reason and deliberation hinder versus help the formation of accurate beliefs. Several studies have suggested that people who engage in more reasoning are less likely to fall for fake news. However, the role of reliance on emotion in belief in fake news remains unclear. To shed light on this issue, we explored the relationship between experiencing specific emotions and believing fake news (Study 1; N = 409). We found that across a wide range of specific emotions, heightened emotionality at the outset of the study was predictive of greater belief in fake (but not real) news posts. Then, in Study 2, we measured and manipulated reliance on emotion versus reason across four experiments (total N = 3884). We found both correlational and causal evidence that reliance on emotion increases belief in fake news: self-reported use of emotion was positively associated with belief in fake (but not real) news, and inducing reliance on emotion resulted in greater belief in fake (but not real) news stories compared to a control or to inducing reliance on reason. These results shed light on the unique role that emotional processing may play in susceptibility to fake news.
Highlights
The 2016 US presidential election and UK Brexit vote focused attention on the spread of “fake news” (“fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent”; Lazer et al 2018, p. 1094) via social media
We used the R packages lme4 (Bates et al 2015), lmerTest (Kuznetsova et al 2017), and arm (Gelman and Su 2018) to perform linear mixed-effects analyses of the relationship between perceived accuracy, specific emotions measured by the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule scale (PANAS), and type of news headline
We found a positive association between self-reported use of emotion and belief in fake news, and that the more participants relied on emotion over reason, the more they perceived fake stories as accurate
Summary
The 2016 US presidential election and UK Brexit vote focused attention on the spread of “fake news” (“fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent”; Lazer et al 2018, p. 1094) via social media. In contrast, suggested that fears over widespread exposure to and consumption of fake news may be overstated, as fake news accounts for less than half a percent of Americans’ daily media diet (Allen et al 2020). While similar findings have supported the conclusion that fake news websites make up a small proportion of media diets overall, these studies. Research (2020) 5:47 have shown that fake news is disproportionately visited by specific groups of people (e.g., supporters of Donald Trump; Guess et al 2020; social media users over the age of 65; Guess et al 2019). Regardless of the impact of fake news on the average Americans’ overall media consumption, fake news may still impact the belief in and spread of news in key political and demographic communities
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