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Misinformation is like a disease. Understanding how it spreads is key for stopping it. Given the information environment we are in, getting a handle on what is true and what is misleading is not just a question of integrity and morality but a matter of survival. Disinformation kills people.
Poor quality information short-circuits wise decision-making, leading to the spread of preventable diseases, undermining public health initiatives, and delaying or obstructing us from recognizing and responding to escalating threats, including climate change, COVID 19, human migration, and many others.
People tend to "believe lies despite the obvious truth" if something seems like it might be true (the "gist" versus "verbatim" truth), and is aligned with their values and wishes. Moreover, they are also likely to share it without pause. However, research is less clear about what individual factors come into play when people decide whether to engage with or share potentially misleading posts on social media.
Studying Drivers of Disinformation
To understand the drivers of disinformation, Morosoli and colleagues conducted research published in the journal American Behavioral Scientist (2022). They looked at sociodemographic factors including gender, age, and educational level; permissive factors such as social media behavior including, political beliefs, consistency with one’s own attitudes on a given subject (“attitudinal congruence,” e.g. if I believe climate change is a hoax, and I see news in line with that idea, there is greater congruence), the importance of the issue at hand (“issue salience”), along with relevant personality traits, specifically the dark triad of narcissism, sociopathy and Machiavellianism.
Researchers surveyed over 7,000 people in six different countries, all Western democracies (Switzerland, Belgium, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA). They focused on information about climate change, immigration, and COVID-19, all polarizing social issues known to be fraught with disinformation.
Subjects were shown three sample social media posts, one on each issue, designed for the purposes of the study to contain misleading information, mirroring actual posts. They were told their opinions were being solicited to help an online news service vet the posts prior to publication. They were asked how likely they would be to engage with a given post, and how motivated they would be to share it. Various demographic factors, attitudes, and political beliefs were surveyed using accepted rating scales.
Correlates of Engagement with and Sharing of Misleading Social Media News
The researchers found that males, older individuals, and people with lower educational achievement were significantly more likely to engage with sample posts. The dark triad personality traits of narcissism and psychopathy were associated with greater engagement with social media posts. Moveover, people whose political orientation was conservative (versus liberal) were more likely to engage with the posts.
Subjects said they were more likely to share sample posts when they were aligned with their attitudes and beliefs, for example fake news saying climate change wasn't real when they didn't believe in it in the first place. The more relevant an issue was perceived to be, as well, the more likely participants indicated they would be motivated to share a given post. Participants were most likely to engage with the post on climate change protest, followed by immigration and, last, coronavirus.
Perhaps not surprisingly, people who used social media more in general were more likely to indicate a willingness to engage with posts. Those with greater baseline trust in social media news reported greater motivation to disseminate posts. People who tended to engage with posts from friends and families were also more likely to share posts, suggesting a synergistic social effect.
There were some nuanced findings requiring further investigation. For example, while right-leaning people were more likely in general to go along with disinformation, the effect was stronger for the immigration-related post. Likewise, attitude also mattered more with immigration: Engagement with misinformation was more likely when the information in the post aligned with one’s perspective.
Notably, for the climate change post, news blaming protestors for leaving behind garbage drove greater engagement because of the attribution of blame more than the issue of climate change itself, highlighting the importance of the details in understanding dissemination of disinformation on social media. This suggests that inserting inflammatory material into social media news, even if irrelevant to the main points, could be used manipulatively to drive engagement and sharing.
Making Sense of an Increasingly Murky and Fast-Paced Information Environment
More work is required to fully understand how disinformation propagates through social media engagement and sharing. Painstaking research to look at each individual issue, along with relevant subfactors, would be required to map out all the different paths and factors predicting both belief in falsehood as well as engagement with it and sharing. of it. Research would need to tap such psychological factors as the “illusory truth effect”1 and how beliefs and upbringing can incline some to blindly follow authoritative leaders.
Given that research of this nature can be used both in the service of truth as well as to bolster disinformation efforts, there is emerging an escalating information arms race in which different stakeholder groups are in a position to make use of research on the psychology of disinformation for whatever their own goals may be.
Where it will lead is hard to predict. Hopefully, research like this can be used to establish a consensus on how to manage information as the grand social experiment of technology unfolds and shapes our world.
References
1. The illusory truth effect shows that when people hear something repeated over and over, it begins to feel true, regardless of whether it is true or not. We see this in politics, when people repeat false messages in order to influence voter belief.
Morosoli S, Van Aelst P, Humprecht E, Staender A, Esser F. Identifying the Drivers Behind the Dissemination of Online Misinformation: A Study on Political Attitudes and Individual Characteristics in the Context of Engaging With Misinformation on Social Media. American Behavioral Scientist. August 2022. doi:10.1177/00027642221118300
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