Why do we believe in fake news?

We all know that information disorder is not a recent phenomenon — mobilizing and manipulating information was a feature of history long before journalism established standards that define news as a genre based on particular rules of integrity — but it also a common view that powerful new technology makes manipulation and fabrication of content simple and social networks dramatically amplify falsehoods.

Based on the Digital News Report of 2020 results, in my last article, I wrote about the way the new coronavirus crisis reinforced the need for reliable journalism. Quick wrap-up:

• There are considerable country differences even within Europe, ranging from Finland and Portugal where over half (56%) of respondents said they trust news most of the time to less than a quarter in France (23%);
• In the 38 countries examined, just six countries have trust levels of over 50%;
• The news media were considered to have done a good job in helping ordinary people understand the extent of the crisis (60%), and also in making clear what people can personally do to mitigate the impact (65%).

So, with that said, the key question for this joined-up thinking is “why do we believe in fake news?” And once again, let’s read what the experts that studied the phenomenon have to say:

1. Digital culture: “a whole new level of reliance upon social information; and a whole new set of hazards and anxieties around errors, manipulation, and cascades of influence.”

This perspective is widely explained by Tom Chatfield, in this article published in the BBC website, and is based on two initial assumptions: we’re all deluged by more information than we can possibly handle, and human judgement also relies upon secondary information that doesn’t come from any external source.

Accordingly to the British writer, broadcaster, tech philosopher, and educator, these two facts related to the digital culture create an info storm — “in the sense of a sudden and tempestuous flow of social information.” In other words, when you have too much information, but you don’t have a medium to find if it’s true or false, or “if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof.”

2. Cognitive laziness, targeted emotions, and other psychological reasons

Christopher Dwyer is a researcher and educator at the National University of Ireland, Galway. For this expert in Critical Thinking, Metacognition, Memory, and Decision-Making, there are six psychological reasons to understand why we fall for fake news, explained in a Psychology Today article.

• We tend to favor information that confirms our existing beliefs;
• We trust that our source of news and the information they provide to us is, in fact, true, without going deeper in the content, looking for evidence, or searching for the same information in other media outlets;
• We don’t read everything, we want the information fast;
• We are cognitively lazy and since verifying the truth of news stories don’t play an important role in our daily lives, we don’t use a reflective judgment;
• Fake news is made in a way that breeds emotions and this presents a large barrier against critical thinking;
• The more we are exposed to certain information, either if it’s true or false, the more likely we are to believe that information.

3. Repetition, Pronounceability, and Familiarity

“The Psychology of Fake News: Accepting, Sharing, and Correcting Misinformation,” a new collection of research articles edited by Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela Jaffe, Eryn Newman, and Norbert Schwarz was recently summarized on the NiemanLab website and points out three main reasons to explain why and how people believe false information.

The first one is related to something that we’ve just talked about — repetition. According to this perspective, the power of repetition is most pronounced for claims that people feel uncertain about and it increases agreement among people who actually know that the claim is false. Then, the authors point pronounceability to justify why people tend to give higher credibility and trustworthiness to a source whose name is easy to pronounce. And last but not least, people are more likely to accept information as true as time passes by. “In short, frequent exposure not only increases the apparent truth of a statement, it also increases the belief that the statement came from a trustworthy source.”

To close this endless discussion, I would like to quote Katy Steinmetz: “Humans like to think of themselves as rational creatures, but much of the time we are guided by emotional and irrational thinking. That is, of course, the way social-media platforms have been designed.” And this is why, even if it’s not a recent phenomenon, information disorder finds, in the digital environment, a way to spread faster than ever.

I don’t have a definite answer for the starting question, but I’m pretty sure that if you have arrived here, we’re actually doing something crucial: thinking about it. And this is an important step.