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The Joint Effect of Social Comparison and Social Distance on Evaluation of Intertemporal Choice Outcomes in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: August 25, 2023
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Time pressure reduces misinformation discrimination ability but does not alter response bias
Mubashir Sultan1,2, Alan N Tump3,4, Michael Geers3,5
1Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Adaptive Rationality, Berlin, 14195, Germany. mubashirsultan@outlook.com.
Scientific Reports
|December 27, 2022
Summary
Social acceleration online, or time pressure, impairs people's ability to discern true from false news. Misinformation susceptibility factors like familiarity still influence judgment, highlighting risks of faster online information environments.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Social Science
- Information Science
Background:
- Social acceleration is increasing the pace of modern life.
- The impact of this acceleration on online news veracity judgment and misinformation spread is under-researched.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how accelerated online dynamics, specifically time pressure, affect individuals' evaluation of online news.
- To understand the influence of time pressure on misinformation susceptibility and its key determinants.
Main Methods:
- Participants evaluated the truthfulness of news headlines under conditions with and without time pressure.
- Signal detection theory was employed to analyze discrimination ability and response bias.
- Key determinants of misinformation susceptibility, including analytical thinking, ideological congruency, motivated reflection, and familiarity, were assessed.
Main Results:
- Time pressure significantly decreased the ability to accurately distinguish between true and false news (reduced discrimination ability).
- Time pressure did not affect the general tendency to label news as true or false (response bias).
- Factors like ideological congruency and familiarity continued to influence judgments even under time pressure.
Conclusions:
- Accelerated online environments, characterized by time pressure, diminish individuals' capacity for accurate news veracity assessment.
- Established drivers of misinformation susceptibility persist under time pressure, exacerbating the risks.
- Interventions promoting deliberate information processing are recommended to mitigate online misinformation.
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