The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings

By Gordon Pennycook, Adam Bear, Evan T. Collins, David G. Rand. Management Sciences, 2020

644 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09f147cc852d2b982ca6a7696e006858e3de859e

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Citations in the corpus

Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, neutral): “Unlike the previously mentioned researchers who focus on news content in their approaches, Pennycook and Rand (2019) focus on using crowdsourced judgments of the quality of news sources to combat social media disinformation.”
Moderating with the Mob: Evaluating the Efficacy of Real-Time Crowdsourced Fact-Checking (2021, background): “At the same time, there is evidence that identifying false or misleading content can lead to a meaningful decrease in its impact, as tagging an article as false or misleading noticeably decreases the likelihood an individual will believe it (Pennycook et al. 2017).”
A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India (2020, background): “In addition, other studies evaluate the effectiveness of providing warnings about specific misinformation (33, 34).”
Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems (2022, background): “This is analogous to the implied truth effect [56], where a tool to help identify possible issues falsely increases confidence that there are not other issues.”
The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, positive): “In addition to straightforwardly undermining the reach of fact-checks, this sparse application of warnings could lead to an 'implied truth' effect where users may assume that (false or misleading) headlines without warnings have actually been verified [84].”