The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings
The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.3035384
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发表时间：
2019-08
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Gordon Pennycook;Adam Bear;Evan T. Collins;David G. Rand
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文献类型：
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作者：
Gordon Pennycook;Adam Bear;Evan T. Collins;David G. Rand
如何打击政治误导？一项突出的干预措施是在受到第三方事实核查人员质疑的新闻报道标题上附加警告。在这里，我们展示了这样一个警告的一个迄今未被认识到的潜在后果：一个隐含的真相效应，即没有被标记的虚假标题被认为是有效的，因此被视为更准确。通过一个正式的模型，我们证明了贝叶斯信念更新可以导致这样一个隐含的真理效应。在研究1（n = 5，271 MTurkers）中，我们发现，虽然警告确实会导致相对于控制条件（特别是对于政治一致的标题）的虚假标题的感知准确性适度降低，但我们也观察到了假设的隐含真相效应：警告的存在导致未标记的标题被视为比控制更准确。在研究2（n = 1，568 MTurkers）中，我们在决定考虑在社交媒体上分享哪些头条新闻的背景下发现了相同的效果。我们还发现，附加验证一些真实的标题，这消除了是否未标记的标题没有检查或已验证的歧义消除，事实上略有逆转，隐含的真相效果。这些结果一起挑战理论的动机推理，同时确定一个潜在的挑战，政策的警告标签，以打击错误信息的挑战，特别是考虑到它是更容易产生错误信息比它是揭穿it.This文件被接受埃尔克韦伯，判断和决策。
What can be done to combat political misinformation? One prominent intervention involves attaching warnings to headlines of news stories that have been disputed by third-party fact-checkers. Here we demonstrate a hitherto unappreciated potential consequence of such a warning: an implied truth effect, whereby false headlines that fail to get tagged are considered validated and thus are seen as more accurate. With a formal model, we demonstrate that Bayesian belief updating can lead to such an implied truth effect. In Study 1 (n = 5,271 MTurkers), we find that although warnings do lead to a modest reduction in perceived accuracy of false headlines relative to a control condition (particularly for politically concordant headlines), we also observed the hypothesized implied truth effect: the presence of warnings caused untagged headlines to be seen as more accurate than in the control. In Study 2 (n = 1,568 MTurkers), we find the same effects in the context of decisions about which headlines to consider sharing on social media. We also find that attaching verifications to some true headlines—which removes the ambiguity about whether untagged headlines have not been checked or have been verified—eliminates, and in fact slightly reverses, the implied truth effect. Together these results contest theories of motivated reasoning while identifying a potential challenge for the policy of using warning tags to fight misinformation—a challenge that is particularly concerning given that it is much easier to produce misinformation than it is to debunk it. This paper was accepted by Elke Weber, judgment and decision making.