GRAND Magazine - Summer 2022 - 32
media
How our brains help misinformation go viral
A new study finds that we are
easily persuaded by popular beliefs,
even if they're wrong.
BY YASMIN ANWAR
s social creatures, we humans care what others think and are influenced
by the number of likes, hearts, and retweets on social media
posts. The downside? An attraction to popular beliefs-whether
they're true or false-can speed up the spread of conspiracy theories, suggests
new UC Berkeley research.
The findings, published online this month in the journal Open Mind,
confirm how easily people adopt false beliefs based on their perceived
popularity and help them go viral with the stroke of a key.
" Our study shows that people are more likely to adopt pseudoscientific
and misinformed beliefs when they believe them to be more popular, "
said study lead author Evan Orticio, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC
Berkeley. " These results have important implications for how highlighting
social information with 'likes' is more likely to spread fake news. "
Orticio and fellow researchers in UC Berkeley's Kidd Lab sought to
understand the extent of the human mind's vulnerability in the age of
social media. In two separate online experiments, they asked more than
600 U.S. adults how certain they were about statements of fact or fiction,
such as those about humans causing climate change, vaccines causing
autism, and Hillary Clinton heading up a child sex trafficking ring out of a
pizza parlor.
Overall, they found that study participants were more likely to agree
or disagree with a statement after seeing evidence that the belief was
more popular than they had expected it to be. Some who were on the
fence about a controversial issue changed their minds based solely on the
number of endorsements the statement received.
32 GRAND Summer 2022
Continued on next page
A
https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00056/111216/Social-Prevalence-Is-Rationally-Integrated-in
https://www.kiddlab.com/
GRAND Magazine - Summer 2022
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