Affective Information Processing of Fake News: Evidence from NeuroIS

ABSTRACT

Fake news undermines individuals’ ability to make informed decisions. However, the theoretical understanding of how users assess online news as real or fake has thus far remained incomplete. In particular, previous research cannot explain why users fall for fake news inadvertently and despite careful thinking. In this work, we study the role of affect when users assess online news as real or fake. We employ NeuroIS measurements as a complementary approach beyond self-reports, which allows us to capture affective responses in situ, i.e., directly in the moment they occur. We draw upon cognitive dissonance theory, which suggests that users experiencing affective responses avoid unpleasant information to reduce psychological discomfort. In our NeuroIS experiment, we measured affective responses based on electrocardiography and eye tracking. We find that lower heart rate variability and shorter mean fixation duration are associated with greater perceived fakeness and a higher probability of incorrect assessments, thus providing evidence of affective information processing. These findings imply that users may fall for fake news automatically and without even noticing. This has direct implications for information systems (IS) research and practice as effective countermeasures against fake news must account for affective information processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Fake news
• Social media
• Affective information processing
• Electrocardiography
• Eye tracking
• NeuroIS

Acknowledgement

We thank the senior editor, an anonymous associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions. In addition, we thank Kathrin Leppert and Franziska Brendle for their assistance in conducting the experiment. We appreciate funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (grant number 57317901).

Disclosure statement

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

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2023.2224973

Notes

1. Fake news is a phenomenon that entails fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organisational process or intent (Lazer et al., 2018, p. 1094). Accordingly, we refer to “perceived fakeness” as users’ belief as to whether a news item is real or fake (Tsang, 2021). A detailed conceptualisation of the term “fake news” is provided by Khan et al. (2021) and Tandoc et al. (2018).

2. An early version of this manuscript was presented at the NeuroIS Retreat 2019 (Lutz et al., 2020). However, this short paper included only a discussion of preliminary findings. In particular, the mixed-effects regression and all other dependent variables (i.e., incorrect assessments, and decision confidence) are unique to this paper.

3. We thank Reviewer 1 for the valuable feedback to offer an explicit characterisation of fake news.

4. The complex phenomenon of fake news has also been studied from other perspectives, including why fake news is created (e.g., Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Braun & Eklund, 2019; Wang et al., 2021), how fake news propagates (e.g., Altay et al., 2022; Bae et al., 2021; Pröllochs et al., 2021a,b; Laato et al., 2020; London et al., 2022; Solovev & Pröllochs, 2022; Drolsbach & Pröllochs, 2023; Pröllochs & Feuerriegel, 2023; Hopp et al., 2020; Vosoughi et al., 2018), how fake news can be detected through machine learning (e.g., Ducci et al., 2020; Ma et al., 2016; Naumzik & Feuerriegel, 2022), and how exposure to fake news influences existing beliefs (e.g., Abdalla Mikhaeil & Baskerville, 2023; Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Lazer, 2019; Pennycook et al., 2018), among others. For detailed literature reviews about research on fake news, we refer to George et al. (2021) and Pennycook and Rand (2021).

5. Although the term “cognitive dissonance” suggests that this state is only cognitive, the opposite applies: if cognitive dissonance is not resolved, prior research has shown that it triggers affective responses (Harmon-Jones, 2000).

6. The analysis of the decision confidence is provided in Appendix C of the supplementary materials.

7. We performed a user study to ensure that the news headlines do not differ in their writing style. For this purpose, we recruited three groups of 100 participants on Prolific to rate ten combinations of (1) real vs. real, (2) real vs. fake, or (3) fake vs. fake news headlines, respectively. We recruited a balanced sample in regard to gender. Furthermore, we recruited all participants from the United States with English as their first language. The instruction text was “Please indicate how similar you feel that the two news headlines are in terms of their writing style”. Answers had to be provided on 7-point Likert scales from 1=very dissimilar to 7=very similar. We find that the writing style in real and fake news is perceived as being indistinguishable. Statistically, the differences in the mean ratings of the human judges are non-significant according to a Tukey test (M${ }_{\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{l}/\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{l}}=4.05$, SD${ }_{\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{l}/\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{l}}=0.95$, M${ }_{\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{l}/\mathrm{F}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{e}}=3.75$, SD${ }_{\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{l}/\mathrm{F}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{e}}=0.63$, M${ }_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{e}/\mathrm{F}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{e}}=4.15$, SD${ }_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{e}/\mathrm{F}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{k}\mathrm{e}}=0.58$). Additional details are provided in Appendix B of the supplementary materials.

8. An analysis of the self-reported decision confidence is provided in the supplementary materials. We find that users’ decision confidence is higher when their assessment of a news item is correct. However, the decision confidence is not associated with any of our measurement variables. Instead, it is largely explained by the time that users take to assess the news body.