Encountering fake news headlines in social media more than once lowers people’s ethical disapproval of these publications and makes people more likely to share them on social media, according to a new Psychological Science study.
The rise of technology and the growing popularity of social media created ample opportunities for circulation of fake news articles that are intentionally false and misleading. Despite spreading questionable information, fake news articles were found to be more likely to go viral which further increases their reach in society. These trends explain the need for developing a better understanding of how people interact with fake news and what promotes social media users to share these articles further.
The researchers conducted a study exploring how seeing fake news headlines multiple times affects people’s perception of these articles. Drawing on existing knowledge, researchers were interested in how seeing the same misleading headline repeatedly affects one’s ethical assessment of it and one’s propensity to share it.
“We suggest that efforts to fight misinformation should consider how people judge the morality of spreading it, not just whether they believe it,” said study author Daniel A. Effron, a London Business School associate professor of organizational behavior.
The study relied on four experiments involving 2,587 participants in total. The four experiments tested different aspects of people’s reactions and behavior in regard to fake news. The experiments measured how seeing the same headline multiple times would change one’s ethical assessment of it. They examined whether deliberate consideration would affect participants’ ethical perceptions as well as participants’ intentions to like and share the reviewed fake news articles with others.
Experiments’ results indicate that repeatedly encountering an article on social media makes it seem less unethical to share it. In three out of four experiments, participants demonstrated greater likelihood to like and share fake news articles despite being explicitly told that the articles were false.
“The results should be of interest to citizens of contemporary democracies,” Effron said. “Misinformation can stoke political polarization and undermine democracy, so it is important for people to understand when and why it spreads.”
Researchers suggest that the study findings may be explained by increased fluency of repeatedly encountered articles. Repeated information is more fluent and easier to process. Previous research found that fluent information is intuitively perceived as truer. Therefore, repeatedly encountering fake news articles makes them seem truer because of increased fluency. This, in turn, makes people more likely to ethically condemn such articles and to share them on social media.
The study, “Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share“, was authored by Daniel A. Effron and Medha Raj.
