Myrto Pantazi | Truth bias in a post-truth world: The bad and the good news

Myrto Pantazi (Université libre de Bruxelles) delivered the presentation 'Truth bias in a post-truth world: The bad and the good news' during the PERITIA workshop 'How to Address an Infodemic: Experiments on (Dis)Information' held at the London School of Economics on 28 April 2022.

We arguably live in an era of misinformation and “fake news”. A crucial question is what people do in the face of misinformation they encounter: do they tend to believe it or are they capable of evaluating it and rejecting it? I will be presenting experimental research suggesting that humans have a strong but reversible tendency to believe information they process. In several experiments we presented participants with fictional crime reports containing information tagged as true or false. We measured whether people tend to believe this information by testing both whether they would accurately remember the falsity of false statements and whether their judgements about the crime would be affected by the false statements. We consistently find that people tend to misremember false statements as true (more so than they misremember true statements as false) and that their judgments are contaminated by the false information. These result patterns strongly support the existence of a truth bias in the processing of linguistically communicated information, that is, a default tendency to believe information we hear and read. Our studies also suggest that the truth bias is particularly resistant to factors that could be reasonably expected to mitigate it (such as accountability and professional experience in false-truth discernment) but provide evidence that high motivation can be a mitigating factor. Interestingly, increased motivation leads people to process information in a more vigilant way but cannot “correct” for misinformation that has already been encountered. I will conclude by discussing the implications of these findings in view of the contemporary media landscape.

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PERITIA is an EU-funded project exploring public trust in expertise. Our multi-disciplinary team seeks to help citizens and policymakers understand trust in science and identify trustworthy expertise. By doing so, we aim to enhance trust in a better democratic governance for the future of Europe.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870883. The information and opinions on this website and other communications materials are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Commission.

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