Cognitive Elaboration and the Formation of False Memories from Fake News
Sommers, Zenon
2021-05-10
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Sommers Zenon Cognitive Elaboration and the Formation of False Memories from Fake News.pdf
Honors Thesis
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Abstract
The spread and influence of fake news have risen significantly in recent years, as evidenced by the recent insurrection at the US Capitol driven by such disinformation. The relevance of characteristics drawn from the elaboration likelihood model to the influence of fake news was tested in the present study. One such global characteristic is reflexive open-mindedness, which is the tendency to accept new information as valuable without evaluating it critically. Another is need for cognition, which describes the tendency to prefer analytical thinking. A third characteristic is the relevance of the message to the person reading it. The prediction was that high reflexive open-mindedness, high need for cognition, and low personal relevance would predict false memory formation when reading fake news articles. A sample of participants (N = 478) recruited from MTurk in the week preceding the 2020 US presidential election viewed summaries of real and fake news articles and reported whether they remembered the events described in the summaries. Reflexive open-mindedness and need for cognition were measured using the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (Pennycook et al., 2015) and Need for Cognition Scale (Coelho et al., 2018). Personal relevance was assessed by asking participants to report how consequential they thought the election’s outcome would be. Results both support and contradict hypotheses. Greater reflexive open-mindedness was correlated with the falsely remembering more fake stories (r(476) = .12, p = .01). Need for cognition was not associated with number of false memories (r(476) = .06, p = ns). Predicting a greater impact of the election, used as a measure of personal relevance, was associated with fewer false memories (r(476) = -.12, p < .01). A five-stage hierarchical binary logistic regression found that both personal relevance and political extremity contributed significantly to the final model, whereas collinearity reduced reflexive open-mindedness to marginally significant. Need for cognition was not significant at any stage of the model. The reliability of all reported scales and subscales was high (all alphas ≥ .94). These results suggest that low personal relevance and high political extremity predict false memory formation upon reading fake news. The marginal effect of high reflexive open-mindedness may also indicate an influence of that factor. The effects elicited by this study could have significant implications for the design and targeting of interventions against fake news. One presently evident implication is that such interventions should emphasize the importance of the subject matter of such news to the reader.Deep Blue DOI
Subjects
cognitive elaboration false memory fake news bullshit receptivity need for cognition election cognitive processes news media skepticism political elections
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Honors Thesis
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Thesis
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