Department of Psychology, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California, USA.
National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California, USA.
Risk Anal. 2022 Aug;42(8):1704-1727. doi: 10.1111/risa.13719. Epub 2021 Mar 17.
With the increased use of social media in crisis communication following extreme events, it is important to understand how the public distinguishes between true and false information. A U.S. adult sample (N = 588) was presented 20 actual social media posts following a natural disaster or soft-target terrorist attack in the United States. In this study, social media posts are conceptualized as truth signals with varying strengths, either above or below each individual's threshold for believing the post is true. Optimally, thresholds should be contingent on the (incentivized) error penalties and base-rate of true posts, both of which were manipulated. Separate receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses indicate that participants performed slightly better than chance for natural disasters and moderately better than chance for terror attacks. While the pooled thresholds are ordinally consistent with the base-rate and error penalty manipulations, they are underadjusted compared to the optimal thresholds. After accounting for demographic and cognitive variables, the base-rate manipulation significantly predicted sensitivity, specificity, and true response rates in the expected direction for both content domains, while the error penalty manipulation had no significant effect in either domain. Self-identified political conservatives performed worse at classifying false content as false for natural disasters, but better for terror attacks.
随着社交媒体在极端事件后的危机传播中使用的增加，了解公众如何区分真假信息非常重要。一项针对美国成年人的样本（N=588）在自然灾害或美国软目标恐怖袭击后，呈现了 20 个真实的社交媒体帖子。在这项研究中，社交媒体帖子被概念化为具有不同强度的真实信号，要么高于，要么低于每个个体相信帖子真实的阈值。理想情况下，阈值应该取决于（激励性的）错误惩罚和真实帖子的基本比率，这两者都被操纵了。单独的接收者操作特征（ROC）分析表明，参与者在自然灾害方面的表现略好于随机，在恐怖袭击方面的表现略好于随机。虽然汇总阈值与基本比率和错误惩罚操纵在顺序上一致，但与最佳阈值相比，它们的调整不足。在考虑人口统计学和认知变量后，对于两个内容领域，基本比率操纵都显著地以预期的方向预测了敏感性、特异性和真实反应率，而错误惩罚操纵在任何领域都没有显著影响。自我认定的政治保守派在将虚假内容分类为自然灾害的虚假内容时表现不佳，但在恐怖袭击时表现更好。
