Thread by @rudloff_jan

I am beyond happy to announce that my second paper has been accepted by JARMAC (@APA_Journals)☺️ psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-08…
@AppelMarkus and I found that identifying #fakenews is predicted by people‘s ideas about the nature of knowledge and #darktraits 🧵 @PhDVoice @PhD_Genie

🧵The development of effective countermeasures against the distribution of mis- and disinformation, relies on knowledge as to which individuals are more likely to fall for fake news. People have different worldviews regarding facts and knowledge (epistemic beliefs) (2)

People differ in how much emphasis they put on evidence when evaluating the accuracy of information and how much they prioritize their intuition. Moreover, people have different views as to whether there are independent facts or whether “facts” are influenced those in power. (3)

We assumed that individuals who prefer to trust their intuition, who put little emphasis on evidence and who think that facts are formed by those in power (post-truth epistemic beliefs) are particularly susceptible to fake news. (4) 🧵

Prior research has shown that these beliefs are connected to dark personality traits, more specifically the Dark Factor of Personality. 👉 doi.org/10.1111/jopy.1… (5)🧵

In an online experiment, we presented factually accurate and #fakenews posts and asked participants to rate the accuracy of them. Results show that people with post-truth epistemic beliefs and a pronounced Dark Factor distinguished less between accurate and fake news. (7) 🧵

We recommend educating children and adolescents to develop sophisticated epistemic beliefs, which would help them differentiate between accurate and #fakenews and more broadly, enabling them to form opinions and to make decisions based on evidence. (8) 🧵

Btw we found very similar results for COVID-19 conspiracy theories and protective behaviour 👉 doi.org/10.1111/jopy.1… (9/9) 🧵