Fallibility Salience Increases Intellectual Humility: Implications for People’s Willingness to Investigate Political Misinformation

Abstract

The spread of online political misinformation has ramifications for political polarization, trust in political systems, and the functioning of democracy. In this article, we advance findings on investigative behaviors—actions aimed at determining the veracity of information encountered online—in response to political misinformation. Across three preregistered studies (N = 889), we find that investigative behaviors increase accuracy discernment of political misinformation (Study 1), that intellectual humility reliably predicts investigative behaviors in this context (Study 2), and test a novel fallibility salience manipulation to increase intellectual humility (Study 3). We discuss the implications of these findings for reducing the impacts of political misinformation.

Keywords

politics intellectual humility misinformation investigative behaviors

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Allcott

Gentzkow

(2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211–236.

Bago

Rand

D. G.

Pennycook

(2020). Fake news, fast and slow: Deliberation reduces belief in false (but not true) news headlines. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 149(8), 1608–1613.

Batailler

Brannon

S. M.

Teas

P. E.

Gawronski

(2022). A signal detection approach to understanding the identification of fake news. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(1), 78–98.

Baum

Druckman

Simonson

M. D.

Lin

Perlis

R. H.

(2021, July 26). What I saw on the road to insurrection: Internal political efficacy, conspiracy beliefs and the effect of depression on support for the January 6th storming of the capitol. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/tnfj7

Bowes

S. M.

Blanchard

M. C.

Costello

T. H.

Abramowitz

A. I.

Lilienfeld

S. O.

(2020). Intellectual humility and between-party animus: Implications for affective polarization in two community samples. Journal of Research in Personality, 88, Article 103992. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2020.103992

Bowes

S. M.

Costello

T. H.

Lee

McElroy-Heltzel

Davis

D. E.

Lilienfeld

S. O.

(2022). Stepping outside the echo chamber: Is intellectual humility associated with less political myside bias? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(1), 150–164.

Buliga

MacInnis

(2020). “How do you like them now?” Expected reactions upon discovering that a friend is a political out-group member. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 37, 2779–2801. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407520939191

Castronuovo

(2021, February 10). New security video shows lawmakers fleeing during Capitol riot—The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/house/538325-new-security-video-shows-lawmakers-fleeing-capitol

Crawford

J. T.

Pilanski

J. M.

(2014). Political intolerance, right and left. Political Psychology, 35(6), 841–851.

10.

Culliford

(2021, January 12). Online misinformation that led to Capitol siege is “radicalization,” say researchers. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-misinformation-socialmedia-idUSKBN29H2HM

11.

Cutolo

(2021). 12 science trivia questions people always get wrong. Reader’s Digest. https://www.rd.com/list/science-trivia-questions/

12.

Deffler

S. A.

Leary

M. R.

Hoyle

R. H.

(2016). Knowing what you know: Intellectual humility and judgments of recognition memory. Personality and Individual Differences, 96, 255–259.

13.

Faul

Erdfelder

Lang

A.-G.

Buchner

(2007). G* Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175–191.

14.

Fiedler

Schott

Meiser

(2011). What mediation analysis can (not) do. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231–1236.

15.

Finkel

E. J.

Bail

C. A.

Cikara

Ditto

P. H.

Iyengar

Klar

Mason

McGrath

M. C.

Nyhan

Rand

D. G.

Skitka

L. J.

Tucker

J. A.

Bavel

J. J. V.

Wang

C. S.

Druckman

J. N.

(2020). Political sectarianism in America. Science, 370(6516), 533–536. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe1715

16.

Goyer

J. P.

Garcia

Purdie-Vaughns

Binning

K. R.

Cook

J. E.

Reeves

S. L.

Apfel

Taborsky-Barba

Sherman

D. K.

Cohen

G. L.

(2017). Self-affirmation facilitates minority middle schoolers’ progress along college trajectories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(29), 7594–7599.

17.

Guess

A. M.

Lerner

Lyons

Montgomery

J. M.

Nyhan

Reifler

Sircar

(2020b). A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(27), 15536–15545. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1920498117

18.

Guess

A. M.

Nyhan

Reifler

(2020a). Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US election. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(5), 472–480. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0833-x

19.

Haggard

Rowatt

W. C.

Leman

J. C.

Meagher

Moore

Fergus

Whitcomb

Battaly

Baehr

Howard-Snyder

(2018). Finding middle ground between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility: Development and assessment of the limitations-owning intellectual humility scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 124, 184–193.

20.

Hayes

A. F.

(2017). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. Guilford Publications.

21.

Healy

(2021, January 11). These are the 5 people who died in the Capitol Riot. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/who-died-in-capitol-building-attack.html

22.

Iyengar

Lelkes

Levendusky

Malhotra

Westwood

S. J.

(2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22(1), 129–146. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051117-073034

23.

Iyengar

Westwood

S. J.

(2015). Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59(3), 690–707.

24.

Jurkowitz

Mitchell

Shearer

Walker

(2020, January 24). U.S. media polarization and the 2020 election: A nation divided. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/u-s-media-polarization-and-the-2020-election-a-nation-divided/

25.

Koetke

Schumann

Porter

(2021, January). Intellectual humility predicts scrutiny of COVID-19 misinformation. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 13(1), 277–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620988242

26.

Krumrei-Mancuso

E. J.

Haggard

M. C.

LaBouff

J. P.

Rowatt

W. C.

(2020). Links between intellectual humility and acquiring knowledge. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 15(2), 155–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1579359

27.

Krumrei-Mancuso

E. J.

Newman

(2020). Intellectual humility in the sociopolitical domain. Self and Identity, 19, 989–1016. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2020.1714711

28.

Lazer

D. M.

Baum

M. A.

Benkler

Berinsky

A. J.

Greenhill

K. M.

Menczer

Nyhan

Pennycook

Rothschild

Schudson

Sloman

S. A.

Sunstein

C. R.

Thorson

E. A.

Watts

D. J.

Zittrain

J. L.

(2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), 1094–1096.

29.

Leary

M. R.

(2018). The psychology of intellectual humility. https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Intellectual-Humility-Leary-FullLength-Final.pdf.

30.

Leary

M. R.

Diebels

K. J.

Davisson

E. K.

Jongman-Sereno

K. P.

Isherwood

J. C.

Raimi

K. T.

Deffler

S. A.

Hoyle

R. H.

(2017). Cognitive and interpersonal features of intellectual humility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 793–813.

31.

Levitsky

Ziblatt

(2018). How democracies die. Broadway Books.

32.

Martherus

J. L.

Martinez

A. G.

Piff

P. K.

Theodoridis

A. G.

(2019). Party animals? Extreme partisan polarization and dehumanization. Political Behavior, 43(2), 517–540.

33.

Nisbet

E. C.

Cooper

K. E.

Garrett

R. K.

(2015). The partisan brain: How dissonant science messages lead conservatives and liberals to (dis) trust science. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 658(1), 36–66.

34.

Parks

Douglis

(n.d.). Fake news: How to spot misinformation. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774541010/fake-news-is-scary-heres-how-to-spot-misinformation

35.

Pennycook

Bear

Collins

E. T.

Rand

D. G.

(2020). The implied truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news headlines increases perceived accuracy of headlines without warnings. Management Science, 66(11), 4944–4957.

36.

Pennycook

Epstein

Mosleh

Arechar

A. A.

Eckles

Rand

D. G.

(2021). Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online. Nature, 592(7855), 590–595.

37.

Pennycook

McPhetres

Zhang

J. G.

Rand

D. G.

(2020). Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy-nudge intervention. Psychological Science, 31(7), 770–780.

38.

Pennycook

Rand

D. G.

(2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39–50.

39.

Pennycook

Rand

D. G.

(2020). Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking. Journal of Personality, 88(2), 185–200.

40.

Pennycook

Rand

D. G.

(2021). Examining false beliefs about voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 Presidential Election. The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-51

41.

Peters

J. W.

(2018, August 17). In a divided era, one thing seems to unite: Political anger (Published 2018). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/us/politics/political-fights.html

42.

Porter

Schumann

(2018). Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view. Self and Identity, 17(2), 139–162.

43.

Porter

Schumann

Selmeczy

Trzesniewski

(2020). Intellectual humility predicts mastery behaviors when learning. Learning and Individual Differences, 80, Article 101888. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2020.101888

44.

Roozenbeek

van der Linden

(2019). The fake news game: Actively inoculating against the risk of misinformation. Journal of Risk Research, 22(5), 570–580.

45.

Rose

(2019). To believe or not to believe: An epistemic exploration of fake news, truth, and the limits of knowing. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(1), 202–216.

46.

Shrout

P. E.

Bolger

(2002). Mediation in experimental and nonexperimental studies: New procedures and recommendations. Psychological Methods, 7(4), 422–445.

47.

Slotnik

D. E.

Kang

(2021, July 19). “Facebook isn’t killing people”: Biden softens his attack over vaccine misinformation. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/world/biden-facebook-misinformation.html

48.

Soto

C. J.

John

O. P.

(2017). Short and extra-short forms of the Big Five Inventory–2: The BFI-2-S and BFI2-XS. Journal of Research in Personality, 68, 69–81.

49.

Stanley

M. L.

Sinclair

A. H.

Seli

(2020). Intellectual humility and perceptions of political opponents. Journal of Personality, 88(6), 1196–1216.

50.

Tajfel

Turner

J. C.

(1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In Austin

W. G.

Worchel

(Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

51.

Van Bavel

J. J.

Harris

E. A.

Pärnamets

Rathje

Doell

Tucker

J. A

. (2021). Political psychology in the digital (mis) information age: A model of news belief and sharing. Social Issues and Policy Review, 15(1), 84–113.

52.

Van Bavel

J. J.

Pereira

. (2018). The partisan brain: An Identity-based model of political belief. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(3), 213–224.

53.

van der Linden

Leiserowitz

Rosenthal

Maibach

. (2017). Inoculating the public against misinformation about climate change. Global Challenges, 1(2), Article 1600008.

54.

Vosoughi

Roy

Aral

(2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.

55.

Walton

G. M.

Wilson

T. D.

(2018). Wise interventions: Psychological remedies for social and personal problems. Psychological Review, 125(5), 617–655.

56.

West

E. A.

Iyengar

(2020). Partisanship as a social identity: Implications for polarization. Political Behavior, 1–32.

57.

Wetherell

G. A.

Brandt

M. J.

Reyna

(2013). Discrimination across the ideological divide: The role of value violations and abstract values in discrimination by liberals and conservatives. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(6), 658–667. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550613476096

58.

Wingfield

Isaac

Benner

(2016). Google and Facebook take aim at fake news sites. The New York Times, 11, p. 12.

59.

Spreckelsen

T. F.

Cohen

G. L.

(2021). A meta-analysis of the effect of values affirmation on academic achievement. Journal of Social Issues, 77(3), 702–750.

60.

Zachry

C. E.

Phan

L. V.

Blackie

L. E.

Jayawickreme

(2018). Situation-based contingencies underlying wisdom-content manifestations: Examining intellectual humility in daily life. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 73(8), 1404–1415.

61.

Zadrozny

(2020, November 11). Misinformation by a thousand cuts: Varied rigged election claims circulate. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/misinformation-thousand-cuts-varied-rigged-election-claims-circulate-n1247476

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.03 MB