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Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand?

A major focus of current research is understanding why people fall for and share fake news on social media. While much research focuses on understanding the role of personality-level traits for those who share the news, such as partisanship and analytic thinking, characteristics of the articles them...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: McPhetres, Jonathon, Rand, David G., Pennycook, Gordon
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8167913/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34121911
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368430220965709
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author McPhetres, Jonathon
Rand, David G.
Pennycook, Gordon
author_facet McPhetres, Jonathon
Rand, David G.
Pennycook, Gordon
author_sort McPhetres, Jonathon
collection PubMed
description A major focus of current research is understanding why people fall for and share fake news on social media. While much research focuses on understanding the role of personality-level traits for those who share the news, such as partisanship and analytic thinking, characteristics of the articles themselves have not been studied. Across two pre-registered studies, we examined whether character-deprecation headlines – headlines designed to deprecate someone’s character, but which have no impact on policy or legislation – increased the likelihood of self-reported sharing on social media. In Study 1 we harvested fake news items from online sources and compared sharing intentions between Republicans and Democrats. Results showed that, compared to Democrats, Republicans had greater intention to share character-deprecation headlines compared to news with policy implications. We then applied these findings experimentally. In Study 2 we developed a set of fake news items that was matched for content across pro-Democratic and pro-Republican headlines and across news focusing on a specific person (e.g., Trump) versus a generic person (e.g., a Republican). We found that, contrary to Study 1, Republicans were no more inclined toward character deprecation than Democrats. However, these findings suggest that while character assassination may be a feature of pro-Republican news, it is not more attractive to Republicans versus Democrats. News with policy implications, whether fake or real, seems consistently more attractive to members of both parties regardless of whether it attempts to deprecate an opponent’s character. Thus, character deprecation in fake news may in be in supply, but not in demand.
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spelling pubmed-81679132021-06-09 Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand? McPhetres, Jonathon Rand, David G. Pennycook, Gordon Group Process Intergroup Relat Articles A major focus of current research is understanding why people fall for and share fake news on social media. While much research focuses on understanding the role of personality-level traits for those who share the news, such as partisanship and analytic thinking, characteristics of the articles themselves have not been studied. Across two pre-registered studies, we examined whether character-deprecation headlines – headlines designed to deprecate someone’s character, but which have no impact on policy or legislation – increased the likelihood of self-reported sharing on social media. In Study 1 we harvested fake news items from online sources and compared sharing intentions between Republicans and Democrats. Results showed that, compared to Democrats, Republicans had greater intention to share character-deprecation headlines compared to news with policy implications. We then applied these findings experimentally. In Study 2 we developed a set of fake news items that was matched for content across pro-Democratic and pro-Republican headlines and across news focusing on a specific person (e.g., Trump) versus a generic person (e.g., a Republican). We found that, contrary to Study 1, Republicans were no more inclined toward character deprecation than Democrats. However, these findings suggest that while character assassination may be a feature of pro-Republican news, it is not more attractive to Republicans versus Democrats. News with policy implications, whether fake or real, seems consistently more attractive to members of both parties regardless of whether it attempts to deprecate an opponent’s character. Thus, character deprecation in fake news may in be in supply, but not in demand. SAGE Publications 2021-05-31 2021-06 /pmc/articles/PMC8167913/ /pubmed/34121911 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368430220965709 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
McPhetres, Jonathon
Rand, David G.
Pennycook, Gordon
Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand?
title Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand?
title_full Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand?
title_fullStr Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand?
title_full_unstemmed Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand?
title_short Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand?
title_sort character deprecation in fake news: is it in supply or demand?
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8167913/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34121911
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368430220965709
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