Study 1a: The Impact of Social Media Engagement Cues on Misinformation Reliability
This study investigated how social media engagement cues, such as likes, retweets, and comments, influence the perceived reliability of misinformation. Using the Bad News game platform, a convenience sample of over 7,700 participants were exposed to fictitious news headlines employing common misinformation tactics like impersonation, polarization, emotional language, conspiracy theories, trolling, and discrediting. Participants were randomly assigned to either a high engagement or low engagement condition, where the number of likes, retweets, and comments displayed alongside the headlines were manipulated. The study found that participants exposed to high engagement cues rated the misleading headlines as more reliable than those exposed to low engagement. This suggests that the appearance of high social engagement can lend an air of credibility to misinformation, even when the content itself is dubious.
Study 1b: Exploring Social Consensus and Source Effects
Building upon Study 1a, this study delved deeper into the mechanisms by which social cues influence misinformation perception. Specifically, it examined whether social cues influence perceptions of social consensus and whether they continue to impact perceived reliability when controlling for source effects. Using Prolific, a sample of 628 participants were randomly assigned to high, low, or control engagement conditions. Instead of fictitious headlines, this study used real misinformation examples sourced from the Hoaxy platform, a tool that tracks the spread of online claims and fact-checks. To control for source effects, the sources of the headlines were blurred. The study confirmed that higher engagement cues led to increased perceptions of social consensus and higher reliability ratings. This indicates that social cues not only directly influence perceived reliability but also shape individuals’ understanding of what others believe. The findings persisted even when source information was removed, suggesting that the cues themselves hold significant persuasive power.
Study 2: Explicit vs. Implicit Social Cues and Their Influence on Misinformation
This study investigated the differential impact of explicit and implicit social cues on misinformation susceptibility. A sample of 730 participants recruited through Prolific were randomly assigned to one of five conditions: control (no cues), implicit endorsement, implicit discrediting, explicit endorsement, or explicit discrediting. Explicit cues involved directly informing participants about the reliability judgments of a previous group, while implicit cues involved showing comments that either endorsed or discredited the headline. The misinformation headlines used in this study, taken from Hoaxy, primarily employed emotional language manipulation techniques and were presented in a Facebook-like layout. Results revealed that both explicit and implicit endorsement cues increased perceived reliability and perceived consensus, while discrediting cues had the opposite effect. This emphasizes the power of social influence in shaping misinformation beliefs and highlights the different ways social cues can be presented to manipulate perceptions.
Study 3: The Role of Source Slant in Misinformation Susceptibility
This large-scale study explored the influence of source slant (liberal vs. conservative) on how people perceive misinformation. Utilizing the Bad News platform, over 10,500 participants were exposed to headlines with manipulated sources. Participants were randomly assigned to see headlines attributed to either liberally slanted sources (e.g., CNN), conservatively slanted sources (e.g., Fox News), or a control condition with the source blurred. The study found that source similarity, meaning alignment between a participant’s political ideology and the source’s slant, significantly influenced headline reliability ratings. Participants rated headlines from sources aligned with their political views as more reliable, even when the headlines contained misinformation. This underscores the importance of considering source credibility and its interaction with individual biases when evaluating information online.
Study 4: Source Credibility and Similarity in Misinformation Evaluation
This study aimed to disentangle the effects of source credibility and source similarity on misinformation susceptibility. A sample of 790 US participants from Prolific were assigned to one of four conditions in a 2×2 factorial design, manipulating both source credibility (high vs. low) and source similarity (similar vs. dissimilar). Source descriptions and visual meters were used to manipulate these variables. Participants then rated the reliability of misinformation and factual headlines. The findings reinforced the importance of both source credibility and similarity. High credibility sources, regardless of similarity, increased reliability ratings for both true and false headlines. However, the effect of similarity was more pronounced for low credibility sources, where similar sources increased perceived reliability of misinformation despite their known lack of credibility. This reveals the complex interplay between source characteristics and individual biases in shaping misinformation beliefs. It highlights the danger of relying on partisan cues when evaluating information from less credible sources.
Overall Findings and Implications
These four studies consistently demonstrate the powerful influence of social cues and source characteristics on how individuals perceive and evaluate information online, particularly in the context of misinformation. Engagement cues, perceived consensus, source slant, and source credibility all play significant roles in shaping beliefs about the reliability of information. These findings have important implications for understanding the spread of misinformation and developing interventions to combat it. They highlight the need for media literacy education that emphasizes critical evaluation of sources and social cues, as well as the importance of platform design choices that minimize the potential for manipulation through these factors. Furthermore, they underscore the complex interplay between individual biases and external influences in shaping online information processing.