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Two suggestions posited by Adam Waytz, an associate professor of management and organisations at the Kellogg School are.

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Motivated Reasoning: If you’re motivated to believe negative things about a politician, you’re more likely to trust outrageous stories about them that might not be true

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Naïve Realism: this is our tendency to believe that our perception of reality is the only accurate one, and people who disagree with our view are necessarily uninformed, irrational or biased. These views can be reinforced by our tribal nature, a behaviour which has evolved online!

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This, in part helps to explain the polarisation in our political discourse, instead of disagreeing with our opponents challenging them on our their views we look to discredit them.

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Waytz argues that there’s an assumption that fake news exacerbates polarisation, but it might be the case that polarisation exacerbates fake news.

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Much of our susceptibility to fake news has to do with how our brains are wired. We like to think our political convictions correspond to a higher truth, but in fact they might be less robust and more malleable than we realise.

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According to a study by the Media Insights Group published in 2014 60% of their respondents only read the headline of an article suggesting that the combined effects of motivated reasoning, naïve realism, and social consensus prevent people from reaching objective conclusions.

A 2021 study by MIT Sloan School of Management, Political Science Department and Media Lab found that by injecting short-form learning into the page to interrogate the content prior to sharing they could encourage a deeper level of sharing discernment.

This suggests that we can encourage a more considered approach to online news consumption by adopting the nudge principle, nudging people to examination prior to judgement.

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Author: Greig Dowling