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Beyond Cognitive Ability: Susceptibility to Fake News Is Also Explained by Associative Inference

Published: 25 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We conducted a preliminary online study (N=261) investigating whether people's susceptibility to fake news on social media depends on how fake news are associated with real news that they viewed previously, as well as individuals' cognitive ability. Across two phases, we varied the association in three between-subjects conditions, i.e., associative inference, repetition, and irrelevant (control). Our study results showed limited impact of association type on participants of low cognitive ability. In contrast, for participants of high cognitive ability, their discrimination of fake news from real news tended to be worse for the associative inference condition than for the other two conditions. Thus, our findings suggest that individuals of high cognitive ability are likely to be susceptible to form the belief of fake news, but differently from those of low cognitive ability.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2020
    4474 pages
    ISBN:9781450368193
    DOI:10.1145/3334480
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 25 April 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. associative inference
    2. cognitive ability
    3. fake news
    4. false memory

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    View all
    • (2024)The Influence of Affective Empathy on Online News Belief: The Moderated Mediation of State Empathy and News TypeBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1404027814:4(278)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Information overload and misinformation sharing behaviour of social media usersJournal of Information Science10.1177/0165551522112194250:6(1371-1381)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Analyzing Aspects of Critical Thinking Coupled with Technology for Fake News IdentificationIntelligent IT Solutions for Sustainability in Industry 5.0 Paradigm10.1007/978-981-97-1682-1_40(497-511)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
    • (2023)“Fact-checking” fact checkers: A data-driven approachHarvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review10.37016/mr-2020-126Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Fake news and false memory formation in the psychology debateIBRO Neuroscience Reports10.1016/j.ibneur.2023.06.00215(24-30)Online publication date: Dec-2023
    • (2022)Untraining Ethnocentric Biases about Gender Roles: A Preliminary Empirical Study Presenting Art as StimulusProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202210.1145/3543758.3547543(376-381)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2022

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