Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Science. 2024 Nov 29;386(6725):991-996. doi: 10.1126/science.adl2829. Epub 2024 Nov 28.
We tested a hypothesis that misinformation exploits outrage to spread online, examining generalizability across multiple platforms, time periods, and classifications of misinformation. Outrage is highly engaging and need not be accurate to achieve its communicative goals, making it an attractive signal to embed in misinformation. In eight studies that used US data from Facebook (1,063,298 links) and Twitter (44,529 tweets, 24,007 users) and two behavioral experiments (1475 participants), we show that (i) misinformation sources evoke more outrage than do trustworthy sources; (ii) outrage facilitates the sharing of misinformation at least as strongly as sharing of trustworthy news; and (iii) users are more willing to share outrage-evoking misinformation without reading it first. Consequently, outrage-evoking misinformation may be difficult to mitigate with interventions that assume users want to share accurate information.
我们检验了一个假设，即错误信息利用愤怒来在网上传播，并考察了多个平台、时间段和错误信息分类的普遍性。愤怒具有很高的吸引力，而且不需要准确就能达到其传播目的，这使其成为错误信息中很有吸引力的嵌入信号。在八项研究中，我们使用了来自 Facebook（1063298 个链接）和 Twitter（44529 条推文，24007 名用户）的美国数据以及两项行为实验（1475 名参与者），结果表明：（i）错误信息源比可信赖的信息源更能引起愤怒；（ii）愤怒与分享可信赖的新闻一样，至少同样强烈地促进了错误信息的分享；（iii）用户更愿意在不先阅读的情况下分享引起愤怒的错误信息。因此，对于那些假设用户想要分享准确信息的干预措施来说，引起愤怒的错误信息可能难以缓解。
