How Fake News Spreads
- An extensive study shows that people are more likely to adopt pseudoscientific and misinformed beliefs when they believe them to be more popular.
- These results have important implications for how highlighting social information with ‘likes’ is more likely to spread fake news.
- 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.
2 days ago
