In addition, this theory helps explain how and under what conditions people are likely to form partisan beliefs (Bolsen et al. More specifically, this theory explains how our goals can steer information processing away from rationality and accuracy, leading to biased reasoning. One prominent theory that speaks closely to the issue of “fake news” suggests that people’s motivations-their preference for some outcome-affect the strategies used when reasoning (Epley and Gilovich 2016 Kunda 1990). An alternative instead proposes that the more involved people are with a topic, the narrower the range of ideas they will find acceptable (Sherif et al. One such theory proposes that the more involved people are with a topic, the more likely they are to attend to the content of that message over less central information, like the credibility of the source (Greenwald 1968 Petty and Cacioppo 1981). The answers to these questions could inform theories of persuasion and reasoning that explain how people interpret information-including information reported by the media. For example, satirical sources of information like The Onion might reasonably be classified as fake news, but not necessarily propaganda (Tandoc et al. The rise of the phrase “fake news” as an alternative label for what might at times be considered propaganda is politically and psychologically intriguing, and leads to interesting questions: Which news sources do people consider real news, or fake news, and why? Do the news sources people categorize as fake news differ from those they categorize as propaganda? One possibility is that people interpret the phrase “fake news” to simply mean a new way of saying “propaganda.” But an alternative possibility is that people make distinctions between fake news and propaganda. Pizzagate was born from fake news: The roots of the conspiracy theory trace back to a white-supremacist’s twitter post that went viral (Akpan 2016).Īnother word for a similar phenomenon to “fake news” is already part of our vocabulary: propaganda. Or take the now-debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which came to a dramatic conclusion when a man fired three rifle shots in a pizzeria because he believed that the restaurant was involved in a child-sex ring linked to members of the Democratic party. Misinformation researchers have repeatedly shown that people fail to remember retractions of false or misleading information, especially with the passage of time (Lewandowsky et al. Ultimately, it is difficult to know how successful such attempts will be, but there is reason to believe we need them. Other recent work shows that people are better able to remember corrections to false statements when given reminders of those statements (Wahlheim et al. Recent evidence, for example, shows that deliberately generating misleading information in the guise of a game improves the ability to detect and resist fake news (Roozenbeek and van der Linden 2019). Social scientists have joined these efforts too. Multiple groups sprouted efforts to educate the public in sorting fact from fiction, including: The News Literacy Project ( ), the Washington Post (Berinsky 2017), and even social media giant Facebook (Price 2017). Fake news quickly became a worrying phenomenon.
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