Fake News’ Contents and Our Identities

We live in an age where information has never been more powerful. Now, information reaches societies with extraordinary ease and mobilizes them in unprecedented ways. However, this situation brings up a potential problem: Misinformation and fake news. These concepts, which mean presenting any erroneous information or news as accurate, are seen as a very current and vital issue, considering the power of social media. Thus, we feel the need to verify any information before accepting it as fact. Along with external factors, recent research suggests that there are psychological factors that might play a part in determining the truth of any information (Gupta et al., 2021). In our research, we focused on the content of fake news and aimed to examine which social psychological factors may be associated with detecting these contents.

We tend to feel closer to those with whom we think we share similar values, world views, and daily life practices. We would even like them better compared to those whom we do not include in our social circle. These social circles could be any group or entity, such as our families, colleagues, football teams, countries, or social classes. What is common in all of these social circles is the fact that people who feel belonging to them tend to favor people in that specific circle over others who do not belong. Such favoring behavior is well-observed in various areas of life. In fact, recent research suggested that people attribute falsehood or truth to information in social media with respect to their social identities (Ittefaq et al., 2022; Quand et al., 2020). If they encounter a piece of news blaming their people, group, or circle, they think it is fake news. Likewise, if they read fake news blaming others they do not identify with, they tend to claim that it is true. Judgments about whether the news is true or false are affected by how it reflects the people reading it. For instance, if the news portrays a positive outlook about the reader and their social group, they would be more likely to consider the news as true rather than fake.

In our research, we first focused on revealing the contents of the fake news that is shared on some social media platforms. We created a pool of fake news that was confirmed to be fake by a trusted fact-checking network, which is Teyit. We selected fake news that involved references or mentions to certain social groups such as Turks, Chinese, Muslims, Italians, Russians, or Americans. Using qualitative content analysis, we found six themes: blaming own group members, blaming other groups’ members, favoring own group members, favoring other groups’ members, depreciation of other groups’ members, and blaming non-existent groups’ members, such as reptilians or New World Order’s members. Interestingly, nearly half of the fake news content involved some kind of blaming.

Previous research, on the other hand, suggested that the political orientation of the readers affects their judgment about the news, and is especially important when attributing falsehood to the news (Cinelli et al., 2020). Thus, in our second study, we tested if falsehood or truth attributions vary according to group memberships. Additionally, we included thinking styles in our design so that we can test the latest findings suggesting people’s thinking styles are better indicators of whether they think a news post is true or false compared to their political orientation (Pennycook & Rand, 2019).

Masses were affected badly by COVID-19 in various aspects and degrees; however, the Chinese were burdened with the most discreditable blame for spreading the virus (Huang & Liu, 2020). Thus, when we asked questions regarding social groups and identifying with groups, we chose Chinese as non-group members. There were 216 participants in Study 2 over the age of 18 and identifying as Turkish, in which we measured whether identifying with a social group has something to do with fake news evaluation. This was an online study, and participants were presented with an online questionnaire. They were asked to fill out several social psychological batteries, then told that we would present them with 15 fake or true news — all confirmed fake news — and they would indicate how false they think the news posts were by choosing a number between 0 and 100.

We found that thinking styles are not as influential when determining whether a news post is fake or true, but people who feel closer to a social group tend to detect fake news, which includes blame towards their social group. For instance, fake news claiming that Turks are not good at dealing with the challenges of COVID-19 was rated fake by most of the Turkish identifiers. Likewise, those who identify closely with Turks, found fake news blaming others than Turks as true. Interestingly, if this fake news blamed fictional groups where their members did not actually exist, people’s thinking styles were essential. Analytical thinking was especially crucial to detecting fake news that blame fictitious groups. In summary, if fake news involved references to social identities, feelings of belongingness to these identities, or perceiving threats from these groups were important in detecting fake news. All related files could be seen at https://osf.io/cdh7r/.

Our research involved participants who were part of the underrepresented portion of the world’s scientific production contributors, Turks. Also, this research highlighted the importance of fact-checking communities, for they indirectly contribute to improving the quality of social life for disadvantaged group members, such as Chinese during COVID-19. Finally, we believe that examining the news from a self-critical perspective and examining the information presented to us from an analytical perspective to detect such fake news will reduce our likelihood of being affected by such fake content.

Learn more about the research

Çoksan, S., & Yilmaz, A. D. (2023). Focusing on fake news’ contents: The association between ingroup identification, perceived outgroup threat, analytical-intuitive thinking and detecting fake news. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 00, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12371

About the authors

Sami Çoksan is a postdoctoral associate at the Network for Economic and Social Trends, Western University, Canada. His research interests include social identities, intergroup contact, and support for social pro-refugee policies. He currently studies the effect of collective punishment on ingroup consolidation among non-perpetrators in a cross-cultural context.

Ayşenur Didem Yılmaz is a Sabancı University Psychology Master’s program graduate of 2023. She is currently taking a gap year in Turkey. Her interests focus on intergroup contact, social identity, and deprovincialization.

References

Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39–50. Doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.011

Cinelli, M., Cresci, S., Galeazzi, A., Quattrociocchi, W., & Tesconi, M. (2020). The limited reach of fake news on Twitter during 2019 European elections. PLoS ONE, 15(6), e0234689. Doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234689

Gupta, A., Sukumaran, R., John, K., & Teki, S. (2021). Hostility detection and Covid-19 fake news detection in social media. arXiv. Doi: 10.48550/arXiv2101.05953

Ittefaq, M., Abwao, M., Baines, A., Belmas, G., Kamboh, S. A., & Figueroa, E. J. (2022). A pandemic of hate: Social representations of COVID-19 in the media. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 22(1), 225–252. Doi: 10.1111/asap.12300

Quandt, T., Boberg, S., Schatto-Eckrodt, T., & Frischlich, L. (2020). Pandemic news: Facebook pages of mainstream news media and the coronavirus crisis — A computational content analysis. arXiv. Doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2005.13290

Huang, J., & Liu, R. (2020). Xenophobia in America in the age of coronavirus and beyond. Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology, 31(7), 1187–1188. Doi: 10.1016/j.jvir.2020.04.020