Facts are hard to come by: discerning and sharing factual
information on social media

Facts are hard to come by: discerning and sharing factual
information on social media

Keywords: misinformation, epistemic vigilance, social endorsement, content–attitude congruity, reflective thinking

How credulous are we when engaging information on social media? Addressing this question, this article aims to understand how individuals’ ep-
istemic vigilance, a set of cognitive mechanisms that comprise our system of precaution in social interactions, may operate and fall short.

Reporting findings from two survey experiments (Study 1, N 1⁄4 413; Study 2, N 1⁄4 392), we show that participants tended to be skeptical toward
social media news, were reasonably successful in identifying true news, and reported a tendency to share true rather than false news. In one
study, social endorsement enticed a higher accuracy rating of news posts. In both studies, people judged attitudinally congruent news posts as
being more accurate and reported a higher likelihood to share them. Individuals’ propensity to reflective thinking measured by cognitive reflection
test potentially operated as a restraint on sharing inaccurate information and bolstered veracity anchoring in their information engagement.

Fangjing Tu 1,*, Zhongdang Pan1

, Xinle Jia

https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad021

1 May 2023

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