New research suggests that the human desire to connect and fit in with others may provide clues as to why people support unverified claims like fake news. Findings from a series of seven studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that collectivism was tied to greater acceptance of fake news and a tendency to find meaning in vague claims.
Many people choose to support empty claims despite a lack of evidence or even a blatant disregard for the truth. But what makes people susceptible to these claims? A team of researchers led by Ying Lin proposed that the answer to this question has to do with collectivism — the valuing of social connection and fitting in.
The theory is that collectivism drives people to want to make sense of a claim to “seek common ground” with the communicator. “This focus on making sense motivates people to interpret, fill in the blanks, and construct meaning for empty claims,” the researchers explain. “People are more likely to experience claims as truthful, meaningful, even profound once they have filled in the blanks that allow them to construct meaning.” Lin and her team launched a series of seven studies to explore this idea.
First, an analysis of data from a national sample of Americans revealed that the more respondents endorsed collectivist values, the more they felt that astrology had scientific merit. Similarly, data from a national Chinese sample revealed that the more respondents endorsed collectivism, the more they believed in a fabricated news claim that Wifi destroys sperm and in “fortune-telling, palm-reading, and Feng Shui.”
Another study was conducted among Chinese residents during the height of the coronavirus outbreak. Respondents with higher collectivist values were more likely to believe in novel fabricated claims related to the pandemic, but not existing fake claims that had been officially denounced. Moreover, evidence suggested that this tendency was partly explained by the creation of false memories — participants who were more collectivist were more likely to falsely remember having seen the novel fabricated claims, and in turn, more likely to believe in them. Subsequent studies among Americans found that those with higher collectivist values were more likely to believe fake news about COVID-19, as well as fake news unrelated to COVID-19 (e.g., “eating pizza is linked to financial security”).
The researchers also found evidence that people from China — a more collectivist country than America — are more likely to support empty claims compared to Americans. In a cross-cultural study, Chinese participants were more likely than Americans to find meaning from randomly-generated metaphors like, “Love is a tree.” A follow-up study suggested that this effect is driven by a motivation to find meaning among collectivists. Americans higher in collectivism found more meaning in the metaphor “Love is a forest” and generated more explanations for why it was meaningful. The number of explanations mediated the effect of collectivism on finding meaning.
Moreover, an experimental study found causal evidence of the collectivist effect — manipulating participants to feel more collectivist led them to rate more vague word-strings as profound and to find more truth in a fake news story. A final study found that the effect of collectivism on meaning-making was present only when respondents believed that a vague metaphor was written by a human, but not when they believed it was randomly generated. This suggests that the effect was driven by a desire to find common ground with a human communicator.
“Our results suggest that people higher in collectivism are spontaneously attuned to what others are trying to communicate, presuming that any claim they see is created by another person and hence is supposed to have meaning,” the study authors write, later adding, “This very human sensitivity to the communicative intent of others is likely to be a reason why conspiracy theories, fake news, and pseudoscience spread.”
The study, “Seeing Meaning Even When None May Exist: Collectivism Increases Belief in Empty Claims”, was authored by Ying Lin, Charles Y. Zhang, and Daphna Oyserman.