By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
A fake news headline can cause a person’s blood to boil, especially if it takes aim at their favored political party.
That emotional reaction apparently makes them immune to being told that the news they are upset about is not true. A fact check just isn’t enough to counter a juicy gem designed to cause a stir.
Christy Galletta Horner, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development, and a research team recently published the results of a study, “Emotions: The Unexplored Fuel of Fake News on Social Media,” in the Journal of Management Information Systems, a leading journal in the field.
“We were just interested in what emotions they feeling when they see these fake news headlines,” she said of the study’s subjects in a recent telephone interview, “and then how do they think about these fake headlines being shared Do they react with positive or negative emotion depending whether they felt that the headline, even though it’s fake, would either help or hurt their own political party they associate themselves with?”
The researchers had a sample of just under 900 subjects, Republicans, Democrats and independents.
They created sets of fake headlines. Each headline was presented in two ways: one put the Democrats in poor light while the other, though exactly the same in all other respects, put Republicans in bad light.
The first wave of surveys occurred shortly before the 2020 Presidential election with a follow up a couple months later.
The subjects were shown a headline. They were asked about emotional response to the headline and how likely it was that the headline was true.
When they were told the headline was false, they were asked how they felt about it being shared on social media, and what would they do. The researchers also posed some open ended questions about why they feel the way they do.
One headline, for example, asserted: “Campaign insider: Newly revealed health report leads 32 congressional Democrats (or Republicans) to recommend Biden (or Trump) quit presidential bid”
Others addressed COVID and the role of large pharmaceutical firms.
The one they ended up focusing most was: “Trump (or Biden) campaign hired hackers to plant viruses in voting machines in states lacking paper ballot backups.”
Some of the findings are hardly surprising, she indicated. “Generally people were more likely to believe the headlines that aligned with the beliefs they already had.”
The researchers found that responses fell into three groups: hot, upset, and cold.
The hot group expressed a lot of emotions both negative and positive in response to the headlines. And they were more likely to take actions to either spread or suppress items.
They would click on links, read the posts, comment, like posts, and respond with fact checks.
Those in the upset group mostly had negative emotions, such as fear and anxiety, while they acted to suppress it, or try to push back on it, they would not spread the headlines.
The largest group was the cold group. They had little emotional response and would not engage to either suppress or spread. Horner said they responded that they did not feel it was their place to get involved. They didn’t want to create any friction among their family or friends by countering the fake news they were sharing.
This is the group, Horner said, she’s most concerned about.
Fake news insinuates itself even if people aren’t reacting or sharing it. People read the headline, and move on, but it may still stick with them.
It gets to the point that some people respond that even if a story is false, they feel it is close enough to truth and still share it.
The research didn’t address how to combat the spread of fake news. But it’s clear any solution must take emotional responses, not just intellectual responses, into consideration, Horner said.
Many people are quick to dismiss fact checks. “If it fits their narrative, they’re going to dismiss any information to the contrary,” Horner said. “A lot of it is driven by emotion.”
She expects that the best way to combat fake news may be for people to address it within their own “echo chambers.” Perhaps by calling out fake news meant to benefit their party, they could be more effective.
She said that “helping people become better at understanding their own emotional processes” is a long-term approach, still it would help.
“We think fake news is dangerous regardless of which party it is attacking,” Horner said. “We want to reduce its prevalence regardless who it’s intending to damage.”
It leads people to make bad decisions, exacerbates the partisan divide, and can even cause extremism. “It’s hurting everyone.”
