The Psychology of Fake News

The advent of “fake news” disseminated by social media is a relatively novel phenomenon, the impact of which has not been extensively studied. Rather than purporting to give an authoritative account, then, I will describe two competing models that can be used to structure empirical investigation of the effect of “fake news” on public opinion. The information aggregator account (IA) sees individuals’ beliefs as a register of the sum total of information sources to which they’ve been exposed. The motivated processor account (MP), in contrast, treats individuals’ predispositions as driving both their search for information and the weight they assign any information they are exposed to. These theories generate different predictions about “fake news”: that it will significantly distort public opinion, in the view of IA; or that it will be near irrelevant, in the view of MP. In addition to discussing the provenance of these theories in the science of science communication, I will identify some of the key measurement challenges they pose for researchers and how those challenges can be surmounted.