How Your Social Network and Thinking Style Influence Belief in Misinformation
Our new study finds that personal network structure and cognitive style predict believing different types of misinformation
Hi all! It’s been awhile since I posted here, but I wanted to share a new article I published. Psychologist Cecilie Steenbuch-Traberg and I recently published an article titled: "Personal Network Composition and Cognitive Reflection Predict Susceptibility to Different Types of Misinformation" in the journal Connections. Our paper dives into how personal network composition and cognitive reflection affect people's susceptibility to misinformation. We also differentiate between two types of misinformation: vague political rumors and clearly fabricated fake news headlines, and analyze how each type influences belief and sharing behavior.
To study this, we recruited survey participants evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, and had them evaluate factual and fake headlines while also measuring their personal network composition. We found that individuals with politically homogeneous networks (i.e., networks where most people share the same political identity) are more likely to believe and share misinformation that aligns with their politics. Specifically, these individuals are more susceptible to vague political rumors (e.g. hearing a story about a member of their political ingroup or outgroup helping someone), which are often identity-based and reinforce in-group favoritism and out-group hostility. We also found that stronger network homogeneity predicts a greater sense of political identity, which could reinforce biased beliefs about one’s political in-group and out-group.
Beyond network effects, we also explored the role of cognitive reflection, which is the ability to engage in slow, deliberate thinking. Our results show that while cognitive reflection does not affect beliefs in political rumors, it does influence the ability to discern between real and fake news headlines. Individuals with higher cognitive reflection scores were better at identifying fake news. However, this effect of cognitive style was only statistically significant among Republican participants.
Our study shows that susceptibility to misinformation is driven by a combination of social network composition and cognitive reflection, with each playing distinct roles depending on the type of misinformation. These network effects are consistent with my previous research on political attitudes and vaccine attitudes. Overall, it’s important to consider how both social and cognitive factors influence how we determine truth from fiction.
Read the full article online here
Finally, I hope to post more regularly on Substack to share some of my recent research. Also, a brief update about my book: it passed peer-review, was officially accepted for publication, and it is finally in production! I will have update here as soon as I have a pre-order link.