Publications by authors named "Samuel Woolley"
Article Synopsis
- - Resistance to truth and vulnerability to falsehood present significant threats to democracies worldwide, as shown by a study examining beliefs in real vs. fake political headlines among Trump supporters and opponents during the 2020 election.
- - The study found that people were more likely to believe and share headlines that aligned with their political views rather than those that were true, a tendency that persisted across different education levels and reasoning abilities.
- - Key factors influencing this "concordance-over-truth" bias included belief in the objectivity of one’s political side, strong opinions about Trump, and consumption of one-sided media; notably, those with higher analytic reasoning could better identify truths when they matched their ideology.
The digital spread of misinformation is one of the leading threats to democracy, public health, and the global economy. Popular strategies for mitigating misinformation include crowdsourcing, machine learning, and media literacy programs that require social media users to classify news in binary terms as either true or false. However, research on peer influence suggests that framing decisions in binary terms can amplify judgment errors and limit social learning, whereas framing decisions in probabilistic terms can reliably improve judgments.
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