Séminaire – Christian UNKELBACH

Why people may believe false information despite knowing betterThe modern world experiences strategic misinformation, fake news, and the apparent loss of belief in traditionally credible sources such as universities. Thus, the question of how and why people believe information to be true is a prominent research topic. I will approach this question from a Brunswikian perspective: Truth is a distal concept that cannot be assessed directly. Instead, people must use cues that may be indicative of information’s factual truth status. I will distinguish between two broad classes of cues, namely informational cues (e.g., knowledge sources, advice) and experiential cues (e.g., familiarity, fluency). The former cues may be misleading; that is, a source may be faulty or advice may be wrong. The latter cues are a priori true; if information feels familiar or is processed fluently, the experience has an inherent truth value. With this assumption, one may explain and predict when and why people believe false information despite knowing better. I will present several experiments that pit these two classes of cues against each other and show that they jointly inform judgments of truth. However, if the cues contradict each other, people still use the experiential cue, even for highly relevant topics and with tangible costs for themselves in an incentivized paradigm. The present framework thereby provides a basis for explaining false beliefs and suggest novel paths for debunking false information Christian UNKELBACH (University of Cologne)