Fake news, fast and slow: Deliberation reduces belief in false (but not true) news headlines.

Publisher: American Psychological Assn Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 7502587 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1939-2222 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00221015 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Exp Psychol Gen Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: Washington, American Psychological Assn.

Deception* ; Mass Media*; Intuition/*physiology ; Thinking/*physiology; Adult ; Female ; Humans ; Male ; Politics

What role does deliberation play in susceptibility to political misinformation and "fake news"? The Motivated System 2 Reasoning (MS2R) account posits that deliberation causes people to fall for fake news, because reasoning facilitates identity-protective cognition and is therefore used to rationalize content that is consistent with one's political ideology. The classical account of reasoning instead posits that people ineffectively discern between true and false news headlines when they fail to deliberate (and instead rely on intuition). To distinguish between these competing accounts, we investigated the causal effect of reasoning on media truth discernment using a 2-response paradigm. Participants ( N = 1,635 Mechanical Turkers) were presented with a series of headlines. For each, they were first asked to give an initial, intuitive response under time pressure and concurrent working memory load. They were then given an opportunity to rethink their response with no constraints, thereby permitting more deliberation. We also compared these responses to a (deliberative) 1-response baseline condition where participants made a single choice with no constraints. Consistent with the classical account, we found that deliberation corrected intuitive mistakes: Participants believed false headlines (but not true headlines) more in initial responses than in either final responses or the unconstrained 1-response baseline. In contrast-and inconsistent with the Motivated System 2 Reasoning account-we found that political polarization was equivalent across responses. Our data suggest that, in the context of fake news, deliberation facilitates accurate belief formation and not partisan bias. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Miami Foundation; Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative; William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Investissements d'Avenir program; Scientific Research Fund Flanders

Date Created: 20200110 Date Completed: 20201214 Latest Revision: 20201214

20231215

10.1037/xge0000729

31916834