Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning
Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.011
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发表时间：
2019-07-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Rand, David G.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Pennycook, Gordon;Rand, David G.
人们为什么会相信公然不准确的新闻标题（“假新闻”）呢？我们是运用推理能力来说服自己那些与我们的意识形态相符的陈述是真实的，还是推理能让我们有效地辨别真假，而不受政治意识形态的影响呢？在这里，我们通过两项研究（总计N = 3446名“机械 Turk”平台的工作者），使用认知反思测试（CRT）作为衡量进行分析性推理倾向的指标，对这些相互竞争的解释进行了测试。我们发现，CRT成绩与假新闻的感知准确性呈负相关，与辨别假新闻和真新闻的能力呈正相关——即使是对于那些与个人政治意识形态相符的标题也是如此。此外，对于与意识形态相符的标题，总体辨别能力实际上比对不相符的标题更好。最后，标题层面的分析发现，CRT与相对不可信（主要是假的）标题的感知准确性呈负相关，与相对可信（主要是真的）标题的感知准确性呈正相关。相比之下，CRT与感知准确性之间的相关性与标题和参与者意识形态的契合程度无关。因此，我们得出结论，分析性思维被用于评估标题的可信度，无论这些报道与一个人的政治意识形态是否一致。我们的研究结果因此表明，对假新闻的易感性更多是由懒惰的思维而非党派偏见本身所驱动——这一发现为打击假新闻开辟了潜在的途径。
Why do people believe blatantly inaccurate news headlines ("fake news")? Do we use our reasoning abilities to convince ourselves that statements that align with our ideology are true, or does reasoning allow us to effectively differentiate fake from real regardless of political ideology? Here we test these competing accounts in two studies (total N =3446 Mechanical Turk workers) by using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) as a measure of the propensity to engage in analytical reasoning. We find that CRT performance is negatively correlated with the perceived accuracy of fake news, and positively correlated with the ability to discern fake news from real news - even for headlines that align with individuals' political ideology. Moreover, overall discernment was actually better for ideologically aligned headlines than for misaligned headlines. Finally, a headline-level analysis finds that CRT is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively implausible (primarily fake) headlines, and positively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively plausible (primarily real) headlines. In contrast, the correlation between CRT and perceived accuracy is unrelated to how closely the headline aligns with the participant's ideology. Thus, we conclude that analytic thinking is used to assess the plausibility of headlines, regardless of whether the stories are consistent or inconsistent with one's political ideology. Our findings therefore suggest that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se - a finding that opens potential avenues for fighting fake news.