Why do people fall for misinformation?

Is it because people are unable to discern what is true from false? Is it because people are too willing to believe anything is true? Or is it because people selectively accept ideology-congruent information while rejecting ideology-incongruent information? Using Signal Detection Theory (SDT), my research disentangles these distinct sources of misinformation susceptibility and investigates the psychological factors that give rise to each.

Myside Bias

One of the largest and most pervasive sources of belief in misinformation is myside bias, or the tendency to be more accepting of ideology-congruent information compared to ideology-incongruent information. My research aims to identify the psychological factors that drive this bias. To do this, I have explored several questions...

Bayesian or Biased?

Do people believe ideology-congruent information because they want to believe it? Or merely because it is consistent with what they already believe to be true? To tackle this motivation-cognition debate, I have utilized the minimal groups paradigm to randomly assign people to novel groups, thereby eliminating group differences in prior knowledge. In doing so, we find that people show myside bias for their novel groups even without any differences in prior knowledge. In doing so, this work demonstrates the role of motivation in myside bias.

Expectations or Interpretations?

Do people expect preferred information to be true regardless of the evidence at hand? Or do people selectively interpret the evidence in a biased manner? In more recent work, I have utilized Drift Diffusion Modeling to distinguish these two possibilities. We find that myside bias works primarily by biasing the way that people accumulate evidence in favor of a true or false decision, as opposed to biasing a priori expectations.