Original ArticlesLazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning
Introduction
One of the more captivating developments of the 2016 US Presidential election was the apparent rise of political fake news stories on social media. One analysis indicated that Facebook engagement (likes, comments, shares) was actually greater for the top 20 fake news stories than the top 20 real news stories in the three months leading up to the election (Silverman, Strapagiel, Shaban, & Hall, 2016). What are the cognitive mechanisms that explain why patently false (and often quite implausible) news stories have been able to gain traction on social media? Here we contrast two broad accounts of the cognitive mechanisms that explain belief in fake news: A motivated reasoning account that suggests that belief in fake news is driven primarily by partisanship, and a classical reasoning account where belief in fake news is driven by a failure to engage in sufficient analytic reasoning.
Fake news is not a new phenomenon. Tabloid magazines have been around since the beginning of the 20th century (Lazer et al., 2018). Nonetheless, fake news as it has been discussed recently (e.g., Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017, Shane, 2017) seems to have gained an unprecedented level of prominence through the rise of social media. Lazer et al. define fake news as (p. 1094): “… fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent.” Fake news, in its present form, consists primarily of highly salient (if implausible) fabricated claims that are created to spread on social media. A common tactic among fake news creators is to use highly partisan political content to drive engagement.
What cognitive factors drive belief in, versus rejection of, fake news? Perhaps the most broadly accepted claim is that belief in political fake news – the category that has captured the majority of the public’s attention – is driven primarily by partisanship (Kahan, 2017, Van Bavel and Pereira, 2018). This claim is supported by pervasive effects of motivated reasoning on various forms of judgment (Haidt, 2012, Kahan, 2013, Mercier and Sperber, 2011). For example, voters are more inclined to support a preferred political candidate when presented with negative information (up to a point; Redlawsk, Civettini, & Emmerson, 2010). Individuals also forcefully debate arguments that are inconsistent with their political ideology but passively and uncritically accept arguments that support their political ideology (Strickland, Taber, & Lodge, 2011). Moreover, there is some evidence that political misconceptions are resistant to explicit corrections (Berinsky, 2017, Nyhan and Reifler, 2010; but see Ecker et al., 2017, Swire et al., 2017). Given the political nature of fake news, similar motivated reasoning effects may explain why entirely fabricated claims have received so much attention on social media. That is, individuals may be susceptible to fake news stories that are amenable to their political ideology. In addition to its support among experts (Kahan, 2017, Van Bavel and Pereira, 2018), this narrative has also been favored in media coverage of belief in fake news (e.g., Beck, 2017, Taub, 2017).
One form of the motivated reasoning account that has gained particular traction is the Motivated System 2 Reasoning (MS2R) account, which posits that explicit deliberation causes people to preferentially believe information which aligns with their ideological identity – that is, cognitive reflection increases the propensity to engage in ideologically motivated reasoning (Kahan, 2013). By this account, deliberation exacerbates partisan differences, and people who are more analytical thinkers wind up more polarized, rather than more accurate, in their beliefs. Supporting this prediction, there is evidence that the propensity to think analytically increases political polarization in the context of climate change (Kahan et al., 2012; see also Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017), gun control (Kahan, Peters, Dawson, & Slovic, 2017; see also Ballarini and Sloman, 2017, Kahan and Peters, 2017), and selective exposure to political information (Knobloch-Westerwick, Mothes, & Polavin, 2017).
In the context of fake news and misinformation, the MS2R account predicts a positive correlation between analytic thinking and perceived accuracy of politically consistent fake news headlines (see Kahan, 2017). The MS2R account is of theoretical importance because it conflicts with an alternative broad perspective in the tradition of dual-process theories of reasoning in which analytic thinking is thought to support sound judgment (Evans, 2003, Stanovich, 2005). We will refer to this alternative account as, simply, the classical reasoning account.
According to dual-process theory, human cognition can be characterized by a distinction between autonomous, intuitive (System 1) processes and deliberative, analytic (System 2) processes (De Neys, 2012, Evans and Stanovich, 2013, Kahneman, 2011, Pennycook et al., 2015a). Consider the following problem from the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005):
A bat and ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The problem elicits a fast, intuitive response (10 cents) that, upon reflection, is obviously wrong (if the ball cost 10 cents, the bat would have to cost $1.10 and they would total $1.20). Nonetheless, the incorrect intuitive response is typically the modal response (e.g., 65% in Pennycook, Cheyne, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2016), indicating an overall failure to engage in reflective reasoning processes (Pennycook & Ross, 2016).
It has been argued that the bat-and-ball problem – and others of its type – reflect a crucial aspect of our cognitive architecture: the willingness or propensity to think analytically (Pennycook, Fugelsang, & Koehler, 2015b). Humans are cognitive misers, in that resource-demanding cognitive processes are typically avoided (Fiske and Taylor, 2013, Stanovich, 1999, Stanovich and West, 2000). Nonetheless, some are less miserly than others and participants who do well on the CRT also perform better on rational thinking tests (Stanovich et al., 2011, Toplak et al., 2014).
This research supports the presumption, pervasive in “classical reasoning” approaches (Kohlberg, 1969, Piaget, 1932), that reasoning supports sound judgment. Indeed, a surge of recent research has broadened the support for this approach further by linking the propensity to engage deliberative reasoning processes (rather than relying on “gut feelings” or intuitions) with skepticism about epistemically suspect beliefs (Pennycook, et al., 2015b). For example, analytic thinking has been associated with religious and paranormal disbelief (Gervais and Norenzayan, 2012, Pennycook et al., 2012, Pennycook et al., 2016, Shenhav et al., 2012), acceptance of some scientific claims (e.g., evolution: Gervais, 2015; astronomy, evolution, geology, mechanics, perception, and thermodynamics: Shtulman & McCallum, 2014), rejection of conspiracy theories (Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014), and the detection of pseudo-profound bullshit (Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2015).
In the context of fake news and misinformation, therefore, the classical reasoning account suggests that analytic thinking will support accurate belief formation about fake news content. Thus, in contrast to the MS2R account, the classical reasoning account predicts that analytic thinking will positively predict the ability to discern between fake and real news, regardless of whether it is consistent or inconsistent with one’s political ideology.
The question of whether analytic thinking supports or undermines fake news susceptibility has consequences for broader perspectives on dual-process theories of cognitive function. The MS2R account suggests that the typical framing of dual-process theories (in which analytic thinking supports sound judgment) may be misguided. The classical reasoning account suggests that the effects of motivated System 2 reasoning uncovered in the context of political claims may be exceptions, rather than the rule. Given that fake news is both highly partisan and plainly untrue, it represents a strong test case to compare the relative scope of these two perspectives. Does analytic reasoning help or hurt? In this paper, we investigate this question by examining the correlation between CRT performance and perceived accuracy of fake and real news headlines that are either ideologically concordant or discordant.
Section snippets
Study 1
We compiled list of fake and real news items (via Pennycook, 2017) that were ideologically attractive to Democrats (e.g., “Pennsylvania Federal Court Grants Legal Authority to REMOVE TRUMP After Russian Meddling,” which we will refer to as Democrat-consistent) or Republicans (e.g., “Election Night: Hillary Was Drunk, Got Physical With Mook and Podesta,” which we will refer to Republican-consistent). If cognitive reflection supports (and exacerbates) motivated reasoning in the realm of news – as
Study 2
In Study 2, we report a replication of Study 1 with a larger set of items and in a larger sample. Data for Study 2 were taken from the control condition of a set of five identical experiments that assessed a fact-checking intervention for fake news (Pennycook & Rand, 2017). CRT scores were collected in these experiments, but their correlation with perceived accuracy and sharing of fake versus real news was not previously analyzed.
The items for Study 2 were created following a large pretest of
Study 3
Across two studies, we found no evidence for the motivated System 2 reasoning account (Kahan, 2013, Kahan, 2017) in the context of political fake news. Specifically, whereas research on political topics such as climate change (Kahan et al., 2012) and gun control (Kahan et al., 2017) indicates that political polarization increases as a function of increased analytic ability, our findings indicate that more analytic people are less (not more) likely to believe politically-consistent fake news
General discussion
Across two studies with 3446 participants, we found consistent evidence that analytic thinking plays a role in how people judge the accuracy of fake news. Specifically, individuals who are more willing to think analytically when given a set of reasoning problems (i.e., two versions of the Cognitive Reflection Test) are less likely to erroneously think that fake news is accurate. Crucially, this was not driven by a general skepticism toward news media: More analytic individuals were, if
Conclusion
The Oxford Dictionary declared “post-truth” to be the word of the year in 2016 and defined it as such: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This is a reflection of a growing issue in the modern world and it is imperative for psychologists to develop a clear understanding of why people fall prey to the various forms of disinformation that we now appear to be inundated with on a
Acknowledgements
We thank Dan Kahan for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (to G.P.), and grants from the Templeton World Charity Foundation and DARPA (to D.G.R.).
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