Ceccarini Francesco, Capuozzo Pasquale, Colpizzi Ilaria, Caudek Corrado
Department of Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi 129188, United Arab Emirates.
IRCCS Istituto Giannina Gaslini, 16147 Genoa, Italy.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2023 Oct 30;13(11):896. doi: 10.3390/bs13110896.
The massive spread of fake news (FN) requires a better understanding of both risks and protective psychological factors underlying vulnerability to misinformation. Prior studies have mostly dealt with news that do not bear any direct personal relevance to participants. Here, we ask whether high-stakes news topics may decrease vulnerability to FN. Data were collected during the national lockdown in Italy (COVID-19 news) and one year later (political news). We compared truth discrimination and overall belief for true news (TN) and FN concerning COVID-19 and political topics. Our findings indicate that psychological risk and protective factors have similar effects on truth discrimination, regardless of whether the news topic is highly or minimally personally relevant. However, we found different effects of psychological factors on overall belief, for high and low personal relevance. These results suggest that, given a high level of cognitive dissonance, individuals tend to rely on proximal or emotional sources of information. In summary, our study underscores the importance of understanding the psychological factors that contribute to vulnerability to misinformation, particularly in high-stakes news contexts.
假新闻（FN）的大规模传播需要我们更好地理解易受错误信息影响的风险和保护性心理因素。先前的研究大多涉及与参与者没有任何直接个人关联的新闻。在此，我们探讨高风险新闻话题是否会降低对假新闻的易感性。数据收集于意大利全国封锁期间（新冠疫情新闻）以及一年后（政治新闻）。我们比较了关于新冠疫情和政治话题的真实新闻（TN）和假新闻在真相辨别和总体信念方面的情况。我们的研究结果表明，无论新闻话题与个人的相关性是高还是低，心理风险和保护因素对真相辨别的影响相似。然而，我们发现心理因素对总体信念的影响在个人相关性高和低的情况下有所不同。这些结果表明，在认知失调程度较高的情况下，个体倾向于依赖直接或情绪化的信息来源。总之，我们的研究强调了理解导致易受错误信息影响的心理因素的重要性，尤其是在高风险新闻背景下。
