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Abstract
Why do people believe blatantly inaccurate news headlines ("fake news")? Do we use
our reasoning abilities to convince ourselves that statements that align with our
ideology are true, or does reasoning allow us to effectively differentiate fake from
real regardless of political ideology? Here we test these competing accounts in two
studies (total N = 3446 Mechanical Turk workers) by using the Cognitive Reflection
Test (CRT) as a measure of the propensity to engage in analytical reasoning. We find
that CRT performance is negatively correlated with the perceived accuracy of fake
news, and positively correlated with the ability to discern fake news from real news
- even for headlines that align with individuals' political ideology. Moreover, overall
discernment was actually better for ideologically aligned headlines than for misaligned
headlines. Finally, a headline-level analysis finds that CRT is negatively correlated
with perceived accuracy of relatively implausible (primarily fake) headlines, and
positively correlated with perceived accuracy of relatively plausible (primarily real)
headlines. In contrast, the correlation between CRT and perceived accuracy is unrelated
to how closely the headline aligns with the participant's ideology. Thus, we conclude
that analytic thinking is used to assess the plausibility of headlines, regardless
of whether the stories are consistent or inconsistent with one's political ideology.
Our findings therefore suggest that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by
lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se - a finding that opens potential
avenues for fighting fake news.