September 19, 2018
Many see the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal as an event that marks the beginning of a post-truth era – a time when truth and lies are indistinguishable. This problem has been made worse by society’s burgeoning social media habit. In light of these circumstances, how do we help people think critically about the credibility of news disseminated on platforms like Facebook and Twitter? The research of CCMC Fellow Professor Alan Dennis seeks to answer this question.
One strand of Professor Dennis’s current research focuses on people’s belief in news on social media. He finds that the way people interact with news on social media is strongly influenced by confirmation bias. His most recent research uses experimental methods to analyze electroencephalogram (EEG) data and participants’ neurophysiological responses to news headlines. When participants saw news stories that aligned with their pre-existing opinions, they focused their attention on them. In contrast, once the participants recognized that a story challenged their opinions, cognition stopped; they simply ignored it.
Dennis’ research has also examined how presenting additional information – flagging fake news, emphasizing the news source, displaying a reputation rating – influences how believable people found a particular news story, and whether changing the presentation mitigates the effects of confirmation bias. Flagging fake news articles had only marginal effects, he found, but displaying the news source before the headline and presenting reputation ratings for the source of articles did both strongly influence people’s beliefs in Facebook news posts. Moreover, the more believable the participants found the story, the more likely they were to say that they would read and share it on Facebook.
This research shows how confirmation bias and the visual manipulation of social media affect people’s belief in the stories presented through those media and, in turn, influences their behavior in sharing real – and fake – news.
You can listen to Alan Dennis talk about his research on fake news on the CCMC YouTube channel.
You can read more about Alan Dennis’ research in these articles:
Dennis, A. (2018). Fake news on social media: People believe what they want to believe when it makes no sense at all. Manuscript under review.
Kim, A., & Dennis, A. (2018). Says who?: How news presentation format influences perceived believability and the engagement level of social media users. In Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE.
Kim, A., Moravec, P., & Dennis, A. (2017, December). Behind the stars: The effects of news source ratings on fake news in social media. Kelley School of Business Research Paper No. 18-3. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3090355 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3090355