Abstract
Misinformation has triggered government inquiries and threatens the perceived legitimacy of campaign processes and electoral outcomes. A new identity polarization has arisen between Remain and Leave sympathizers in the UK Brexit debate, with associated accusations of misinformation use. Competing psychological accounts of how people come to accept and defend misinformation pit self-reinforcing motivated cognition against lack of systematic reasoning as possible explanations. We harness insights from political science, cognitive neuroscience and psychology to examine the impact of trust and identity on information processing regarding Brexit in a group of Remain identifiers. Behaviourally, participants' affective responses to Brexit-related information are affected by whether the emotional valence of the message is compatible with their beliefs on Brexit (positive/negative) but not by their trust in the source of information. However, belief in the information is significantly affected by both (dis)trust in information source and by belief compatibility with the valence of the information. Neuroimaging results confirm this pattern, identifying areas involved in judgements of the self, others and automatic processing of affectively threatening stimuli, ultimately supporting motivated cognition accounts of misinformation endorsement.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.
Highlights
There is increasing concern about social media’s magnification of misinformation, misleading information and conspiracy theories and its impact on democracy (e.g. [1,2,3]; for reviews, see [4,5])
A recent identity-based hybrid (I-bH) account proposes that contextually salient goals control where effort is deployed, with self/identity/ideology-reinforcement weighed against desires for epistemic accuracy [16]
Under the I-bH account we can assume that our participants are motivated in large part, though not completely, by identity protection concerns related to their self-identification as Remain voters
Summary
There is increasing concern about social media’s magnification of misinformation, misleading information and conspiracy theories (hereafter misinformation) and its impact on democracy (e.g. [1,2,3]; for reviews, see [4,5]). Accounts on the acceptance end of the spectrum (self-reinforcing (SR) accounts) propose that misinformation acceptance is largely the product of alignment with an individual’s preferred worldview/ideology/prior beliefs When such alignment occurs, individuals may selectively attend to and process information compatible with what they already believe [6,7,8]. Under the I-bH account we can assume that our participants are motivated in large part, though not completely, by identity protection concerns related to their self-identification as Remain voters (on which they were pre-screened; see Methods) This suggests predictions largely in line with SR accounts, though vmPFC activity related to judging various beliefs (identity protection and truth/accuracy) against one another may emerge
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