Over the last few years, the scientific literature has identified psychological traits typical of people who are pushed to believe in fake news and who then share them online with their colleagues or friends.
Non-reflective but intuitive thinking, high emotionality, dogmatism, anger are the psychological traits that can best describe the person who tends to believe more in such news
.
As part of the collaboration between the wavespace laboratory of Ernst & Young (EY) in Rome and the applied neuroscience group of BrainSigns, startup of Sapienza, with prof.
Fabio Babiloni as scientific manager,
a scientific experiment
was developed with the
aim of characterizing the basic psychological traits as well as the sensory perception of a group of young volunteers (age range 20-35 years) during the perception of some news on the net.
The experimental group saw 10 reports on a computer in random succession, of which 5 were true and 5 were falsified especially for the experiment.
Before the news was given, the participants' psychological traits of conscientiousness, open-mindedness and emotional stability were assessed by means of a remote implicit association test (IAT).
Participants looking at the news had to decide if they were true or false.
During this decision-making activity, it was possible to measure which parts of the news were watched the most and it was possible to measure some emotions such as surprise and perplexity felt during the use of the news itself.
These measurements were obtained using the ocular activity measurement and facial recognition technologies available in the EY wavespace laboratory.
The results obtained underlined that
the people in the study who believed in the fake news administered had psychological traits more prone to intuitive than reflexive thinking, unlike the control group of people who correctly classified fake news as false
.
Furthermore, these people during the use of fake news had greater "surprise" movements than the control group, as well as they had less "perplexity" always compared to the control group.
Finally, the group of people who believed in fake news in the experiment always focused more on the “emotional” elements of the news (in particular the images) than the written text, unlike the control group.
These experiment results suggest that fake news users have a higher level of emotionality than the control group and adopt a more intuitive than reflective cognitive style.
It follows that
a practical methodology to limit the spread of fake news would therefore be to "prevent" the immediate sharing of news on the various platforms
, delaying it and inviting people to reflect further before sharing.
In this way we could limit the influence of emotion and stimulate a more critical thought towards the truthfulness of the news.
This "further reflection" could limit, even in accordance with current scientific literature, the sharing of fake news online by up to 20%.