As partisan vitriol flies in the final month before the US presidential election, a new study offers insight into the question of why people share political misinformation.
Even when a news article would flatter their political party, people tend to expect that sharing true information on social media would benefit their personal reputations more than spreading misleading articles, the research shows. Furthermore, when political articles are shared on Twitter (now X), accurate information tends to garner more approval, finds Jillian J. Jordan, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.
“Even in this politicized, polarized environment that our country finds itself in, people value accuracy.”
Ultimately, Jordan’s research casts doubt on the idea that reputational motivations, and in particular the desire to be seen positively by members of our political party, drive people to share false over true information online.
“Even in this politicized, polarized environment that our country finds itself in, people value accuracy,” says Jordan. “This means that what makes you look the best is to attend carefully to the accuracy of the information you share, and not just to share anything that would benefit your political party if it were true.”
The findings provide a key lesson for companies that advertise and share content on social media to gain a following: Sharing high-quality, accurate information is likely to reflect positively on your reputation.
The paper, “Partisans Neither Expect Nor Receive Reputational Rewards for Sharing Falsehoods Over Truth Online,” was led by Isaias Ghezae, a doctoral student in social psychology at Harvard University, co-led by Jordan, and coauthored by Izzy Gainsburg, associate director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University; Robb Willer, professor of sociology at Stanford University; Mohsen Mosleh, associate professor at the University of Oxford; Gordon Pennycook, associate professor at Cornell University; and David Rand, professor of management at MIT Sloan School of Management.
Challenging a concerning proposal
Jordan studies how individuals and organizations manage their reputations. This research asked whether the desire to look good in the eyes of others might motivate people to indiscriminately share news articles on social media that are favorable to their political party, regardless of whether they are true—or even especially because they are untrue.
“The theory is that the best way to signal your loyalty to your political party is to show that you’re willing to take outlandish stances that will brand you as a supporter.”
The research team was inspired to ask this question in part because scholars in fields like philosophy and evolutionary psychology have put forward a concerning proposal: that people might share politicized misinformation to showcase their allegiance to their political party.
“The theory is that the best way to signal your loyalty to your political party is to show that you’re willing to take outlandish stances that will brand you as a supporter,” explains Jordan.
Could the logic of what academics call “costly signaling” create a perverse incentive to spread fake news, Jordan and her colleagues wondered? “We were interested in testing the idea that reputation motives encourage people to be undiscerning in the information that they share,” she explains.
These questions led Jordan and her coauthors to devise a two-part investigation, in which they first conducted a set of survey studies and second analyzed reactions to Twitter posts.
Would you share this headline?
In both 2021 and 2022, Jordan and colleagues surveyed more than 3,000 participants to gauge their reactions to 588 headlines. The list included false headlines such as “Hispanic Woman Claims Love Child with Trump” and true headlines like “Biden May Keep Some Trump Policies on Trade.”
The researchers asked participants what they thought the consequences would be for their reputations within their own social circles if they shared these headlines. The participants also rated the accuracy of the headlines, as well as how favorable a headline would make their political party look if it were true.
Study participants expected to boost their reputations by sharing information:
- Considered accurate. Participants expected sharing true headlines to make them look better than sharing false or misleading headlines.
- Favoring their preferred political party. Participants expected that sharing headlines favorable to their preferred political party would make them look better than sharing less politically favorable information.
- That’s both accurate and favorable. Critically, says Jordan, participants expected the greatest reputational benefits from sharing headlines that were true and politically favorable. “Just because a claim is politically favorable doesn’t mean it’s any less important for it to be true, in terms of the expected reputation value of sharing it,” says Jordan.
Taking it to Twitter
Next, the researchers looked at how users reacted to 26,000 Twitter posts between 2016 and 2022 that shared the same headlines that were presented in the surveys. The team used the ratio of likes-to-retweets a post received as an index of the approval it garnered. The more a post was retweeted, the more it would appear on people’s feeds, providing them an opportunity to “like” it. Higher like-to-retweet ratios suggest that users took this opportunity to “like” the post a higher share of the time, suggesting greater approval.
The research team found:
- Accurate information elicits more approval than inaccurate information. “Objectively accurate headlines tended to receive more approval than false headlines,” Jordan explains.
- Even politically favorable headlines shared on Twitter tend to elicit more approval if they are accurate. “The pattern whereby accurate headlines received more approval holds and doesn’t become any weaker for politically favorable news,” says Jordan.
The truth matters
Jordan says the findings have implications for social media users, including businesses:
Truth is socially valued compared to misleading news. The results can be seen as reassuring, especially in a contentious election year, Jordan says. “There are concerns that when users of social media platforms are motivated to signal their virtue, it leads them to behave badly,” she says. Yet her results suggest that people expect greater social rewards for broadcasting the truth.
“Our results suggest that sharing information that gets tagged as inaccurate is likely to make users look worse than sharing accurate information.”
How social media platforms can help root out misinformation. The study provides some guideposts for how social media platforms may discourage the sharing of misleading information. Jordan points to X’s “Community Notes” feature, where users can add context or explain why a post might be misleading. Such features, she believes, may constructively serve to amplify the reputational costs of sharing misinformation. “Our results suggest that sharing information that gets tagged as inaccurate is likely to make users look worse than sharing accurate information,” says Jordan.
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