Belief in Fake News is Associated with Delusionality, Dogmatism, Religious Fundamentalism, and Reduced Analytic Thinking

By Michaela Bronstein, Gordon Pennycook, Adam Bear, David G. Rand, Tyrone D. Cannon. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 2019

433 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Delusion-prone individuals may be more likely to accept even delusion-irrelevant implausible ideas because of their tendency to engage in less analytic and less actively open-minded thinking. Consistent with this suggestion, two online studies with over 900 participants demonstrated that although delusion-prone individuals were no more likely to believe true news headlines, they displayed an increased belief in “fake news” headlines, which often feature implausible content. Mediation analyses suggest that analytic cognitive style may partially explain these individuals’ increased willingness to believe fake news. Exploratory analyses showed that dogmatic individuals and religious fundamentalists were also more likely to believe false (but not true) news, and that these relationships may be fully explained by analytic cognitive style. Our findings suggest that existing interventions that increase analytic and actively open-minded thinking might be leveraged to help reduce belief in fake news.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/786ef32a36bdec5fb143eb899fb435645867c827

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Citations in the corpus

A Practical Guide to Doing Behavioral Research on Fake News and Misinformation (2020, background): “Another issue relates to whether one focuses on “discernment” (otherwise referred to as “sensitivity” or “overall accuracy”) versus “bias” (otherwise referred to as “overall belief”) (Batailler et al., 2021; Pennycook & Rand, 2021), or both (e.g., Bronstein et al., 2019).”
The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings (2020, background): “…with the observation that individuals who are more analytic and deliberative are less likely to believe politically concordant false news (Bronstein et al. 2019; Pennycook and Rand 2019b, c), rather than more likely according to the motivated cognition account (Kahan et al. 2012, Kahan…”
Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality (2019, background): “29), a widely used measure of analytic thinking that prior work has found to be associated with an increased capacity to discern true headlines from false headlines (13, 15, 26).”
Analytic-thinking predicts hoax beliefs and helping behaviors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “…et al., 2012), less likely to believe that conspiracy theories are veridical (Swami et al., 2014), better at differentiating real and fake news reports (Bronstein et al., 2019; Pennycook & Rand, 2020), and less likely to find pseudo-profound bullshit compelling (Pennycook, Cheyne, et al., 2015).”
Emphasizing publishers does not effectively reduce susceptibility to misinformation on social media (2020, methodology): “As in previous research on fake news (e.g. Bronstein et al., 2019; Pennycook et al., in press; Pennycook & Rand, 2019b,c), our primary dependent measures were an accuracy rating (4-point scale from “Not at all accurate” to “Very accurate”) and a sharing intention judgment (3-point scale of “no”,…”
You are fake news: political bias in perceptions of fake news (2020, background): “, 2012), research into the psychological underpinnings of belief in fake news and its societal impact is emerging, including the role of partisan identities (Pennycook and Rand, 2019), cognitive style (Bronstein et al., 2019), the spread of fake news during elections (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Gri”
Mistrust and misinformation: A two-component, socio-epistemic model of belief in conspiracy theories (2020, background): “Like BCT, belief in fake news has also been found to be associated with delusion-proneness, bullshit receptivity, and reduced analytic thinking (Bronstein et al., 2019; Pennycook & Rand, 2019, 2020).”
Effects of misinformation on COVID-19 individual responses and recommendations for resilience of disastrous consequences of misinformation (2020, background): “However, researchers documented that religious fundamentalists are inclined to trust in false information [10].”