Why do individuals spread misinformation?
Widespread low media literacy and dIfferent psychological pressures such as cognitive dissonance, selective exposure, and the “backfire effect” can lead to an individual spreading misinformation. Negative emotions are caused by consuming misinformation which then go on to encourage its spread even further.
There are several social and psychological pressures that lead people to spread misinformation. In their 2018 article, “Science audience, misinformation, and fake news” Dietram Scheufele and Nicole Krause identify low media literacy and avoiding cognitive dissonance as factors as to why people may spread misinformation.
In a recent survey done by the Pew Research Center it was found 23% of participants said they had shared fabricated news at some point in their life. It is not unsurprising that so many people are unable to comb through the massive amount of information that is available to them. According to the 2020 U.S. Media Literacy Policy Report, only 14 states have made progress implementing media literacy education in their schools. However, individual reasons to spread misinformation show how efforts to simply improve news/media literacy are insufficient.
People are most likely to accept information when it is logically coherent, comes from a perceived credible source, and maybe most importantly: aligns with their already existing beliefs. Otherwise, this may put a person in a state of cognitive dissonance. Scheufele and Krause say that cognitive dissonance can lead to “biased perception and information processing that complicates the recognition and rejection of falsehoods.”
Cognitive dissonance can manifest itself in motivated information processing where individuals participate in selective exposure. Selective exposure can be understood as an attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance by only selecting news from sources you already trust. These sources may already be publishing misinformation, but are trusted because people do not want to challenge their worldviews.
It is oftentimes the most educated and informed of us who are most at risk for participating in selective exposure.When people think they are an expert on a topic it is difficult to change their beliefs. As Scheufele and Krause describe, this then leads to what is known as the “backfire effect”. As people are presented with new information, their rejection pushes them further and further into their previously held, and potentially misinformed, beliefs.
There have also been many studies that showcase the role that one’s emotions play in their likelihood to spread misinformation. One such 2015 study demonstrated that both anger and anxiety affected whether or not a person would consider misinformation in a partisan versus an open-minded way. Another 2018 study published in Science Magazine analyzing people’s reactions to real and fake news on Twitter showed reading misinformation can lead to feelings of fear, disgust, or surprise. Being angry, anxious or any of these feelings, compounded with a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance, can increase the chances that someone will spread misinformation.
Of course, misinformation spread does not only occur on an individual level. Scheufele and Krause detail how these individual motivations, for better or worse, then begin to create misinformation spread on more organized levels. In the modern information age we see how social media and mass media begin to allow and even encourage misinformation to spread. As well as how misinformation can propagate on even broader societal levels and allow for malicious actors to spread malinformation.
