Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not seem to help

ABSTRACT

Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed – but largely untested – claim that emotionally provocative headlines are associated with worse ability to identify true versus false headlines. Consistent with this proposal, we found correlational evidence that overall emotional response at the headline level is associated with diminished truth discernment, except for experienced anger which was associated with increased truth discernment. The second set of studies tested a popular emotion regulation intervention where people were asked to apply either emotional suppression or emotion reappraisal techniques when considering the veracity of several headlines. In contrast to the correlation results, we found no evidence that emotion regulation helped people distinguish false from true news headlines.

KEYWORDS:

• Misinformation
• fake news
• emotion
• emotion regulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PN8JA, reference number: osf.io/pn8ja.

Notes

1 We refer to deliberation from the dual process perspective (Evans & Stanovich, 2013); that is, a process that requires working memory and cognitive control to operate.

2 When we refer to “emotions”, we always refer to the six basic emotions (Ekman, 1992), as they are frequently associated with intuition, or identified as intuitive processes themselves (Evans, 2012), unlike more complex emotions such as guilt or pride.

3 We added presentation order to the most critical model, in which we analyze the effect of emotion, headline veracity and concordance on perceived accuracies, and found no significant main or interacting effect of order (p > 0.07). Presentation order, however, did have a main effect on how much emotion was experienced, b = 0.6, p = 0.0002; people who had to report emotions first, before accuracy, reported more emotions in general (73%), than people who received the accuracy question first (65.6%).

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge funding from Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements d’Avenir program, BB, LR), ANR Labex IAST (BB, LR), the John Templeton Foundation (DR), and the TDF Foundation (DR).