Finding out why so many people are willing to share misinformation online is a major challenge among behavioral scientists. It’s easy to think that partisanship drives everything. People just share what makes their side look good and their enemies look bad. But the reality is a little more complicated. Surveys show that many people do not seem to carefully assess the accuracy of links, and partisanship may be secondary to the urge to get many “likes” on social media. I have. Given that, it’s not clear why it would entice users to stop sharing something that just a few checks would show to be untrue.
So a team of researchers tried the obvious. If you stop and rate the accuracy of the article, we will give you money. This research shows that even small payments and minimal rewards increase the accuracy of people’s ratings of stories. Almost all of that impact comes from people perceiving stories that don’t support their political positions as factually accurate. Cash has boosted conservatives’ accuracy even further, but they still lag far behind liberals in judging accuracy, and the gap is still wide.
money for accuracy
The basic outline of the new experiment is very simple. Gather a large group of people, ask them about their political leanings, and then show them a lot of headlines that appear on social media sites like Facebook. Headlines were rated based on their accuracy (that is, true or false) and whether they favored liberals or conservatives.
Consistent with past experiments, participants were more likely to rate headlines that supported their political leanings as true. It arose because I liked how it aligned with political trends. While this is true across both the political spectrum, conservatives are much more likely to rate misinformation as true, with researchers previously citing seven different papers as showing it. increase.
This kind of duplication, while useful in itself, is not very interesting. What’s interesting is when researchers started changing this procedure. And the simplest variation was to pay $1 for every story that participants correctly identified as true.
In news that surprises no one, people have improved their ability to accurately identify when a story is not true. In raw numbers, the participant scored an average accuracy rating of 10.4 (out of 16) in the control condition, whereas he scored over 11 out of 16 when payment was involved. This effect also appeared when participants were told that, in lieu of payment, the researcher would give them an accuracy score when the experiment was performed.
What was most striking about this experiment was that nearly all the improvements were seen when people were asked to rate the accuracy of their statements in favor of their political opponents. Rewards have made people better aware of the truth of statements they tend to think are untruthful.
Gap is smaller, but still there
When the experiment was shifted, the opposite was true, people were asked to identify the stories their political allies wanted. This suggests that the participant’s frame of mind played a large role. Motivating participants to focus on politics reduces their interest in accuracy. Notably, the effect was about as big as the monetary prize.
The researchers also created a condition that did not let users know the source of the headline, so they could not identify whether it was from partisan-friendly media. This did not make a big difference in the results.
As mentioned above, conservatives are generally worse than liberals, with the average conservative getting 9.3 out of 16 correct and the typical liberal getting 10.9. Both groups see better accuracy when there is an incentive, but the effect is greater for the Conservatives, with an average accuracy increase of 10.1 out of 16 steps. But this is much better than having no incentives, it’s not. In the absence of incentives, it’s as good as liberals do.
So some of the problems with conservatives sharing misinformation appear to stem from a lack of motivation to do things right, which explains part of the impact. I just exist.
The research team concluded that while scaling the payment system is probably not possible, the fact that accuracy scores had roughly the same impact shows how social networks reduce the misinformation that users spread. suggests that there is a But this seems naive.
Fact checkers were initially touted as a way to reduce misinformation. Consistent with these results, however, they tended to rate many of the pieces shared by conservatives as misinformation and were eventually labeled as biased. Attempts to limit the spread of misinformation on Facebook have seen the heads of these networks accused of censoring conservatives in congressional hearings. So even if it worked in these experiments, attempts to deploy a similar system in the real world could prove very unpopular in some areas.
Nature Human Behavior, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01540-w (About DOI).
