Believing and Sharing False News on Social Media: The Role of News Presentation, Epistemic Motives, and Deliberative Thinking

ABSTRACT How vulnerable are we to misinformation on social media? To address this question, this study examines not only how well (or poorly) individuals discern true and false news on social media, but also how contextual factors in news presentation and individual’s cognitive and motivational tendencies might shape the patterns of their beliefs in and likelihood to engage online news. We conducted an online survey experiment on a sample of Chinese social media users recruited from a national panel (N = 481). The results show that, first, people generally perceived social media news as accurate and were better at correctly identifying truthful news than false news, revealing both a truth bias and a veracity effect. Second, social endorsement cue and news content slant could affect how individuals judge the veracity of a news post and engage it online. Third, evidence was mixed on how individuals’ deliberative thinking propensity and epistemic motive operated. While our primary goal is to present evidence from a non-Western society to shed lights on the psychology of false news on social media, we also strive toward teasing out some implications specific to the China context.