Horne Benjamin D, Nevo Dorit
School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA.
Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Apr 22;15(1):13896. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-98221-7.
In this paper, we build on the theory of ecologically rational heuristics to demonstrate the effect of erroneously placed warning labels on news headlines. Through three between-subjects experiments (n = 1313), we show that people rely on warning labels when choosing to trust news, even when those labels are wrong. We argue that this over-reliance on content labels is due to ecological rationality adaptations to current media environments, where warning labels are human-generated and mostly correct. Specifically, news consumers form heuristics based on past interactions with warning labels, and those heuristics can spill-over into new media environments where warning label errors are more frequent. The most important implication of these results is that it is more important to thoughtfully consider what information needs to be labeled than it is to attempt to label all false information. We discuss how this implication impacts our ability to scale warning label systems.
在本文中，我们基于生态理性启发式理论，以证明新闻标题中错误放置的警告标签的影响。通过三项被试间实验（n = 1313），我们表明，人们在选择信任新闻时会依赖警告标签，即使这些标签是错误的。我们认为，这种对内容标签的过度依赖是由于对当前媒体环境的生态理性适应，在当前媒体环境中，警告标签是人为生成的且大多是正确的。具体而言，新闻消费者基于过去与警告标签的互动形成启发式，而这些启发式可能会蔓延到警告标签错误更为频繁的新媒体环境中。这些结果最重要的启示是，深思熟虑地考虑需要标记哪些信息比试图标记所有虚假信息更为重要。我们讨论了这一启示如何影响我们扩展警告标签系统的能力。
