In February of 2015, as Facebook’s “history” feature unhelpfully reminds me every year, I shared a fake news story.
It described the Beagle Brigade, the real program wherein beagles inspect luggage at airports, and went on to make the false claim that there would soon be a new branch at the Des Moines airport. In retrospect, I recognize that this “news” appeared on my Facebook feed because I lived just north of Des Moines, and because I had a beagle at home. I trusted the news because of the cute beagles, and so I shared it.
As someone who researches fake news for a living, it was an unpleasant surprise to discover I was not immune. Not from the effects of fake news, and not from what’s known as the third-person effect — the tendency to assume that it’s only other people who are subject to the negative influences of media. The incident was doubly embarrassing because the fake news website, PlayBuzz Live, wasn’t even a convincing imitation of a real news source. It had a homepage covered with lurid clickbait ads, and no attempt to convince readers that real journalists had any affiliation with the site.
That discovery made me wonder about the unique ways we engage with fake news stories. Although most people would never knowingly pass along false information, a majority of internet users have nevertheless done so. I therefore researched the ways that individuals judge news items, including potentially prioritizing the trustworthiness of the person being interviewed over the trustworthiness of the writer.
To explore this possibility further, I conducted a study on how people decide how much to trust a news story. I recruited 398 student participants from our college. As they entered the study, all of the participants were told: you’re going to read a news story, and you’re going to be asked to make your best guess about how likely it is to be true.
What participants didn’t know until after the study is that they all saw the same news story, with only a few crucial tweaks. In each case they were told the story had an obscure author named Dakota Harley, a person invented for the purpose of the study whom participants had no reason to trust. The news story always described a food program to help busy people access fresh food and home-cooked meals, and it always featured the opinion of the program’s founder, a man named Lee.
However, in some versions of the news story, Lee was an elderly professor who had a lot of expertise in his field, but not much in common with most college students. In other versions, Lee was a young college student who had life circumstances matched to those of the participants, but not much in the way of expertise. Sometimes Lee’s food program was designed to help nursing home residents, and sometimes it was meant to help new college students.
I expected to find that Professor Lee would inspire more trust when talking about older adults, and that student Lee would inspire more trust when talking about college freshmen. I hoped that participants might ignore Lee entirely, and instead focus on the fact that they had no reason to trust Dakota Harley.
On average, participants rated the news story as being about 63% true. In reality, the story was entirely false. In line with past research (and contrary to popular conceptions about fake news), I found no difference between conservative, liberal, and independent participants’ judgments of the news story. Instead, the key difference in trust came from qualities of the person being interviewed.
I found that participants trusted Lee the student more than Lee the professor, regardless of whether he was talking about an issue that affected college campuses or one that affected nursing homes. Readers who saw student Lee reported feeling more engaged with the story, more willing to trust that it was real, and more confident in their judgment.
When asked to share their thoughts about the news story, several participants mentioned qualities of Lee that led them to trust him: he seemed personable, he spoke from experience, he used clear language. Even the individuals who correctly spotted that the news story was fake often expressed mistrust of Lee himself, mentioning that he had a personal stake in the food program and therefore lacked objectivity. There was very little awareness that Lee did not write the news story, and that author Dakota Harley could have simply lied about Lee in order to draw attention to the food program.
Our results lend support to Narrative Persuasion theory, developed by Melanie Green and Timothy Brock. This theory describes the ways that individuals engage with stories, including the tendency not to care very much about the author’s intentions or credentials as long as the narrative itself is interesting. Narratives tend to have the quality known as “truthiness,” wherein they simply feel true without actually presenting evidence to back up their claims. Even when readers have been warned in advance that fiction is not factual, they still have a tendency to take all facts presented in stories as truthful. They rarely disbelieve fiction, and usually only when the character stating a particular fact is described within the story as untrustworthy or hypocritical. Fake news is fiction, a particularly malicious form of fiction that threatens our ability to be informed citizens and even to protect our own health.
As the COVID-19 crisis has made evident, misinformation online is an ongoing and deeply harmful problem. From unethical marketers peddling fake cures to manipulative filmmakers claiming government conspiracies, content creators have been able to spread their lies through putting words into the mouths of highly respected individuals.
It’s easy, even automatic, to decide how much to trust a news story based on the individual who appears in the preview image or the headline. It’s difficult, but important, to look beyond those cues and critically examine the creators themselves when deciding who to trust. Through scrutinizing author information and confirming the intent of news organizations before engaging with information we see online, we can all become more conscious consumers of news and protect ourselves from misinformation.
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