An MIT-led study reveals a core tension between the impulse to share news and to think about whether it is true.
Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office
March 3, 2023
As a social media user,
you can be eager to share content. You can also try to judge whether it is true
or not. But for many people it is difficult to prioritize both these things at
once.
That’s the conclusion
of a new experiment led by MIT scholars, which finds that even considering
whether or not to share news items on social media reduces people’s ability to
tell truths from falsehoods.
The study involved
asking people to assess whether various news headlines were accurate. But if
participants were first asked whether they would share that content, they were
35 percent worse at telling truths from falsehoods. Participants were also 18
percent less successful at discerning truth when asked about sharing right
after evaluating them.
“Just asking people
whether they want to share things makes them more likely to believe headlines
they wouldn’t otherwise have believed, and less likely to believe headlines
they would have believed,” says David Rand, a professor at the MIT Sloan School
of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results.
“Thinking about sharing just mixes them up.”
The results suggest an
essential tension between sharing and accuracy in the realm of social media.
While people’s willingness to share news content and their ability to judge it
accurately can both be bolstered separately, the study suggests the two things
do not positively reinforce each other when considered at the same time.
“The second you ask
people about accuracy, you’re prompting them, and the second you ask about
sharing, you’re prompting them,” says Ziv Epstein, a PhD student in the Human
Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab and another of the paper’s co-authors. “If
you ask about sharing and accuracy at the same time, it can undermine people’s
capacity for truth discernment.”
The paper, “The
social media context interferes with truth discernment,” is published today
in Science Advances. The authors are Epstein; Nathaniel Sirlin, a
research assistant at MIT Sloan; Antonio Arechar, a professor at the Center for
Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico; Gordon Pennycook, an associate
professor at the University of Regina; and Rand, who is the Erwin H. Schell
Professor, a professor of management science and of brain and cognitive
sciences, and the director of MIT’s Applied Cooperation Team.
To carry out the study,
the researchers conducted two waves of online surveys of 3,157 Americans whose
demographic characteristics approximated the U.S. averages for age, gender,
ethnicity, and geographic distribution. All participants use either Twitter or
Facebook. People were shown a series of true and false headlines about politics
and the Covid-19 pandemic, and were randomly assigned to two groups. At times
they were asked only about accuracy or only about sharing content; at other
times they were asked about both, in differing orders. From this survey design,
the scholars could determine the effect that being asked about sharing content
has on people’s news accuracy judgments.
In conducting the
survey, the researchers were exploring two hypotheses about sharing and news
judgements. One possibility is that being asked about sharing could make people
more discerning about content because they would not want to share misleading
news items. The other possibility is that asking people about sharing headlines
feeds into the generally distracted condition in which consumers view news
while on social media, and therefore detracts from their ability to tell truth
from falsity.
“Our results are
different from saying, ‘If I told you I was going to share it, then I say I
believe it because I don’t want to look like I shared something I don’t
believe,’” Rand says. “We have evidence that that’s not what is going on.
Instead, it’s about more generalized distraction.”
The research also
examined partisan leanings among participants and found that when it came to
Covid-19 headlines, being prompted about sharing affected the judgment of
Republicans more than Democrats, although there was not a parallel effect for
political news headlines.
“We don’t really have
an explanation for that partisan difference,” Rand says, calling the issue “an
important direction for future research.”
As for the overall
findings, Rand suggests that, as daunting as the results might sound, they also
contain some silver linings. One conclusion of the study is that people’s
belief in falsehoods may be more influenced by their patterns of online activity
than by an active intent to deceive others.
“I think there’s in
some sense a hopeful take on it, in that a lot of the message is that people
aren’t immoral and purposely sharing bad things,” Rand says. “And people aren’t
totally hopeless. But more it’s that the social media platforms have created an
environment in which people are being distracted.”
Eventually, the
researchers say, those social media platforms could be redesigned to create
settings in which people are less likely to share misleading and inaccurate
news content.
“There are ways of
broadcasting posts that aren’t just focused on sharing,” Epstein says.
He adds: “There’s so
much room to grow and develop and design these platforms that are consistent
with our best theories about how we process information and can make good
decisions and form good beliefs. I think this is an exciting opportunity for
platform designers to rethink these things as we take a step forward.”
The project was funded,
in part, by the MIT Sloan Latin America Office; the Ethics and Governance of
Artificial Intelligence Initiative of the Miami Foundation; the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation; the Reset initiative of Luminate; the John Templeton
Foundation; the TDF Foundation; the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Australian
Research Council; Google; and Facebook.
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