Social Media, Cognitive Reflection, and Conspiracy Beliefs

Dominik A Stecula,Mark Pickup

doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.647957

Dominik A Stecula, Mark Pickup

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.647957

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Abstract

A growing number of Americans stay informed about current events through social media. But using social media as a source of news is associated with increased likelihood of being misinformed about important topics, such as COVID-19. The two most popular platforms—Facebook and YouTube—remain relatively understudied in comparison to Twitter, which tends to be used by elites, but less than a quarter of the American public. In this brief research report, we investigate how cognitive reflection can mitigate the potential effects of using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for news on subsequent conspiracy theory endorsement. To do that, we rely on an original dataset of 1,009 survey responses collected during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, on March 31, 2020. We find that using Facebook and YouTube for news increases conspiracy belief (both general and COVID-19 specific), controlling for cognitive reflection, traditional news media use, use of web-based news media, partisanship, education, age, and income. We also find that the impact of Facebook use on conspiracy belief is moderated by cognitive reflection. Facebook use increases conspiracy belief among those with low cognitive reflection but has no effect among those with moderate levels of cognitive reflection. It might even decrease conspiracy belief among those with the highest levels of cognitive reflection.

Highlights

A growing number of Americans get their news online, and increasingly on social media platforms like Facebook
We begin by regressing conspiracy theory belief on Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), social media use and our control variables
Looking at the results (Figure 3), we can immediately see that CRT has a statistically significant negative effect on conspiracy belief, and the use of YouTube and Facebook for news each have a statistically significant positive effect on conspiracy theory belief

Summary

Introduction

A growing number of Americans get their news online, and increasingly on social media platforms like Facebook. The number of people in the United States who fall into that category has doubled since 2013.1 It has become conventional wisdom in public discourse that misinformation and conspiracy theories have become more widespread since the advent and growth of social media platforms.. In addition to being more misinformed, social media users are more likely to be exposed to various conspiracy theories (Mitchell et al, 2020), and work has found that use of social media. Cognitive Reflection Moderates Social Media for news correlates with conspiratorial worldview (Foley and Wagner, 2020). This has likely only been exacerbated during the global COVID-19 pandemic, where seemingly countless conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus, its origins, and COVID-19 vaccines, have gone viral on various social media platforms.

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