Are you falling for fake news? Age and analytical thinking might save you

By Dr. Sanchari Sinha Dutta, Ph.D.Nov 17 2024

Discover how age, analytical skills, and ideological leanings impact your ability to detect online misinformation—and why interventions are more critical than ever in today’s polarized digital world.

Study: Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors. Image Credit: Marko Aliaksandr

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany, have conducted a meta-analysis to identify key demographic and psychological factors that determine an individual’s susceptibility to online misinformation. The study, published in the journal PNAS, identifies these factors.

Background

Receiving and spreading online misinformation can have a range of negative consequences in a person’s life, including the development of biased political perception, vaccine hesitancy, and resistance to climate-friendly behaviors.

Nearly five billion people use social media to receive news. Previous studies examining individuals’ susceptibility to online misinformation have primarily focused on single demographic or psychological factors, often leading to conflicting results.

These studies have primarily utilized the well-known news headline paradigm, in which participants evaluate the accuracy of news headlines, i.e., headlines potentially accompanied by a byline or an image.

In this study, scientists have pooled individual participant data from the news headline paradigm and conducted a systematic meta-analysis using Bayesian generalized linear mixed-effects modeling to determine how key demographic and psychological factors impact accurate judgment of online misinformation.

Study design

The meta-analysis included a total of 256,337 unique choices made by 11,561 US-based participants across 31 experiments.

The study examined four demographic factors (age, gender, education, and political identity) that represent major population-level characteristics and four psychological factors (analytical thinking, ideological similarity with news, motivated reflection, and self-reported familiarity with news) that are vital for judging misinformation.

The meta-analysis aimed to decipher how these factors influence two frequently confounded decision-making mechanisms: discrimination ability and response bias. Discrimination ability refers to the ability to distinguish between true and false news, and response bias refers to the tendency to classify news as true or false.

Important observations

The analysis of baseline discrimination ability and participants' response bias across all studies revealed that participants do not exhibit an overall response tendency to treat news as either true or false. However, individual studies demonstrated substantial variability in response bias.

Among the demographic factors analyzed, age showed a positive impact on discrimination ability and a negative impact on response bias. These observations indicate that older people have higher accuracy levels and are more likely to judge a news headline as false.

Regarding gender, no credible effect on discrimination ability was observed. However, a negative association was found with response bias, with female participants showing higher false news bias (classifying news headlines as false) than male participants.

Simplified visual summary of the main signal detection analysis. (A) The Middle shows a visual representation of baseline discrimination ability. The perceived truthfulness of a news headline is represented by an axis ranging from low truth to high truth, as represented via the two Gaussian distributions. The more the distributions overlap, the more similar the true and false news headlines are perceived (i.e., lower the discrimination ability), whereas the less they overlap, the more dissimilar the true and false headlines are perceived (i.e., higher the discrimination ability). The Left shows which factors were associated with reduced discrimination ability and Right shows which factors were associated with increased discrimination ability. (B) The Middle shows baseline response bias, which is determined by a decision criterion (i.e., vertical dashed line). The response for whether a news headline is true or false is dependent on where the headline falls relative to the criterion. If the criterion is placed higher up the perceived truthfulness dimension (Left), more evidence is required to treat a news headline as true, hence a headline is treated as true less often, resulting in a false-news response bias. The opposite holds for a true-news response bias (i.e., less evidence is required to render a news headline as true; Right). The baseline response bias was neutral in our study. Left shows which factors were associated with a false-news response bias and the Right shows which factors were associated with a true-news response bias.

Educational level was positively associated with response bias. Participants with higher educational levels showed a true news bias, which led to a higher accuracy for trustworthy news and a lower accuracy for false news. In other words, higher-education participants exhibited an increased tendency to view news as true.

However, the analysis revealed that higher education did not significantly impact discrimination ability.

Political identity showed a strong negative association with discrimination ability. Republicans had reduced discrimination ability and lower overall accuracy compared to Democrats.

A positive association was also observed between political identity and response bias. While Republicans showed a slightly higher accuracy for true news, Democrats showed the same for false news.

A strong positive association was observed between analytical thinking and discrimination ability. Participants with higher analytical thinking skills showed higher overall accuracy.

Regarding response bias, a negative impact of analytical thinking was observed. This led to the observation that participants with higher analytical thinking were more likely to judge a news headline as false and thus had a greater accuracy for false news.

Regarding ideological congruency (ideological similarity with news), the analysis revealed that participants were more likely to judge news headlines as true if they aligned with their ideological stance and vice versa.

In other words, ideological congruency was associated with an increased tendency to believe news headlines (partisan bias) but had no effect on discrimination ability.

Motivated reflection (higher analytical thinking skills being associated with a greater congruency effect) and self-reported familiarity with news also showed associations with a true news bias.

Among various news headline features, headline topics showed no significant effect on discrimination ability, indicating robust findings across topic types.

News headlines displaying the source of information had a strong, positive influence on discrimination ability, leading to higher overall accuracy. This effect was more pronounced for Republicans than Democrats.

Study significance

The study finds that older people or those with higher analytical thinking are more able to distinguish between true and false news. In contrast, people who identify themselves as Republicans have worse news discriminating ability.

Given the significance of demographic and psychological factors in shaping misinformation accuracy judgments, scientists highlight the need for developing interventions that can target these factors to increase people’s ability to withstand the serious and negative consequences of online misinformation.

Developing such ability in the general population is the key to successfully managing global policy challenges ranging from climate change, violent conflicts, pandemic preparedness, and democratic backsliding.