Participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story
You Are Not So Smart (YANSS) is a great podcast, and one of the recent episodes is right up my street. Based around this paper by disinformation researchers, it introduces the notion of _dis_confirmation bias.
Essentially, they did rigorous research in the US which showed that people prefer concordance with their existing belief systems over conformance with truth. I was expecting to hear philosopher W.V. Quine referenced in terms of his metaphor of us having a ‘web of belief’. Those beliefs that are toward the periphery of the web are more easily jettisoned than those nearer the centre, which are core to our identity.
Anyway, it’s a really interesting episode, especially given that most people think the problem is ‘fake news’. That’s half the problem: the other part is getting people to prefer (and share) true news rather than random stuff that happens to cohere with their existing beliefs.
Resistance to truth and susceptibility to falsehood threaten democracies around the globe. The present research assesses the magnitude, manifestations, and predictors of these phenomena, while addressing methodological concerns in past research. We conducted a preregistered study with a split-sample design (discovery sample N = 630, validation sample N = 1,100) of U.S. Census-matched online adults. Proponents and opponents of 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump were presented with fake and real political headlines ahead of the election. The political concordance of the headlines determined participants’ belief in and intention to share news more than the truth of the headlines. This “concordance-over-truth” bias persisted across education levels, analytic reasoning ability, and partisan groups, with some evidence of a stronger effect among Trump supporters. Resistance to true news was stronger than susceptibility to fake news. The most robust predictors of the bias were participants’ belief in the relative objectivity of their political side, extreme views about Trump, and the extent of their one-sided media consumption. Interestingly, participants stronger in analytic reasoning, measured with the Cognitive Reflection Task, were more accurate in discerning real from fake headlines when accurate conclusions aligned with their ideology. Finally, participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story. Discussion explores why the concordance-over-truth bias observed in our study is more pronounced than previous research suggests, and examines its causes, consequences, and potential remedies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Image: Nijwam Swargiary