People dig deeper to fact-check social media posts when paired with someone who doesn’t share their perspective: Study
People fact-checked social media posts more carefully and were more willing to revise their initial beliefs when they were paired with someone from a different cultural background than their own, according to a study my collaborators Michael Baker and Françoise Détienne and I recently published in Frontiers in Psychology.
If you're French, you're less likely than an English person to believe a tweet that claims Britain produces more varieties of cheese than France. And if you're English, you're more likely than a French person to believe a tweet that claims only 43% of French people shower daily.
More intriguingly, when pairs of English and French people fact-checked such tweets together, how they did so and the extent to which they revised their initial beliefs depended on whether they were “matched” or “mismatched” for cultural identity.
We found French-French and English-English pairs focused on confirming evidence and stuck to their initial beliefs, whereas English-French pairs engaged in deeper searches and revised their beliefs in line with evidence.
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Misinformation on social media is one of the greatest challenges of our time. It contributes to political polarisation, affects people's voting, vaccination and recycling behavior, and is often believed long after it's been corrected.
In recent weeks, misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war has reached unprecedented levels and is fanning ethnic, religious and political tensions worldwide – including on US campuses.
To address the misinformation challenge, researchers need to understand better how people process online information. In addition to contributing to such understanding, our findings suggest that bringing together people
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