The false recognition born by "fake news" is difficult to rectify unless cognitive abilities are high

byRoman Kraft

Even if you believe "fake news" once, there is no problem if you can recognize that it was a lie. However, it seems that it is difficult for a person who is judged "low in cognitive ability" by the vocabulary test, to correct the lie once recognized compared to the person with high cognitive ability.

'Fake news': Incorrect, but hard to correct. The role of cognitive ability on the impact of false information on social impressions - ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289617301617


'Fake news' study finds incorrect information can not be corrected simply by pointing out it's false
http://www.psypost.org/2017/12/fake-news-study-finds-incorrect-information-cant-corrected-simply-pointing-false-50328

The research team at Ghent University in Belgium conducted an experiment on 390 subjects on a subject of a young woman "Natalie". Each subject was vocabulary tested and ranked according to their scores as to whether cognitive abilities are high or low.

The subject was shown a picture of Nathalie, "I was married and I worked as a nurse in a hospital and I was arrested for stealing medicine from the hospital", "I steal medicine for two years and buy clothes "Positive / Negative" "Cool / Active" "Hostile / Friendly" "Hostile / Friendly" "Preferred / Unfavorable" "Reliable / Unavailable" about Natalie after being given information that " "Eight scales of 0 to 100 are given for each of the eight axes," sincere / dishonest "," polite / arrogant "," intellectual / ignorant ".

Subsequently, subjects were told that "it was arrested to steal medicine" and "that selling medicine to buy clothes" was a lie, again a cancellation line was drawn on photographs of Nathalie and erroneous information I gave the materials and reassessed Nathalie.

byIgor Ovsyannykov

As a result of summarizing the evaluation results in this way, those who were classified as "low cognitive abilities" had lower percentage of recognition, even if the information given initially was erroneous, compared to those with high cognitive abilities I understood.

The following graph shows the results of "positive / negative" evaluation on Nathalie. The two groups on the far left were given lie information, after the middle two received corrections of information, the two on the right were the result of the control group being excluded from the beginning erroneous information about Natalie. The darker graph shows the group with low cognitive ability, the thinner one indicates the group with high cognitive ability.


The research team says the research results provide an important basis for understanding the impact of "fake news" and erroneous information on contemporary events.