Misinformation about ecology spreads rapidly in social networks where teenagers, as well as older adults, spend much of their time. Given that teenagers and older adults have cognitive specificities that could make them more or less vulnerable to fake news, in the present study, we investigated the development of the ability to discern fake news from real news about ecology from adolescence to older adults. Adolescents (15–18 years old), young adults (19–23 years old), middle-aged adults (30–45 years old), and older adults (65–80 years old) assessed fake versus real news on ecology and answered questions regarding their attitudes toward eco-friendly behaviors, the resources available to help them engage in these behaviors and their concerns regarding climate change. Finally, the participants completed the cognitive reflection test (CRT) to examine whether their analytical thinking skills were related to fake news detection. The results revealed that adolescents are better at detecting fake news about ecology than older participants are. Results confirmed that analytical reasoning is involved in media truth discernment at all ages and also revealed the valuable influence of the participants’ ecological profiles on the news valuations. This latter effect is, however, absent in adolescents, suggesting that the advantage in media truth discernment for teenagers might result from the critical analysis of information developed in secondary school lessons.
AllgaierJ. (2019). Science and environmental communication on YouTube: Strategically distorted communications in online videos on climate change and climate engineering. Frontiers in Communication, 4, Article 36.
2.
Al-RawiA.OʼKeefeD.KaneO.BizimanaA. J. (2021). Twitter’s fake news discourses around climate change and global warming. Frontiers in Communication, 6, Article 729818.
3.
BagoB.RandD. G.PennycookG. (2020). Fake news, fast and slow : Deliberation reduces belief in false (but not true) news headlines. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149, 1608–1613. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000729
4.
BalakrishnanV.NgW. Z.SooM. C.HanG. J.LeeC. J. (2022). Infodemic and fake news—A comprehensive overview of its global magnitude during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 : A scoping review. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 78, 103144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.103144
5.
BarberN.TaylorC.StrickS. (2009). Wine consumers’ environmental knowledge and attitudes: Influence on willingness to purchase. International Journal of Wine Research, 1(1), 59–72.
6.
BiddlestoneM.AzevedoF.van der LindenS. (2022). Climate of conspiracy: A meta-analysis of the consequences of belief in conspiracy theories about climate change. Current Opinion in Psychology, 46, 101390.
7.
BouquetC.HénaultG.-M. (1997). Commerce international dit équitable, logique marchande et marketing des causes sociales : Vers une symbiose? [So-called fair international trade, market logic, and cause-related marketing : Toward a symbiosis ?]. Université d‘Ottawa. https://doi.org/10.20381/ruor-1238
8.
BrashierN. M.SchacterD. L. (2020). Aging in an era of fake news. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(3), 316–323.
9.
BrownV. A. (2021). An introduction to linear mixed-effects modeling in R. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245920960351
10.
BuričR.KonrádováĽ. (2021). Mindware instantiation as a predictor of logical intuitions in the cognitive reflection test. Studia Psychologica, 63, 114–128.
11.
CaseyB. J.GetzS.GalvanA. (2008). The adolescent brain. Developmental Review, 28(1), 62–77.
12.
Castells GómezN.Garcia-Milà PalaudariasM. M.Miralda BandaA.Luna LujánJ.Pérez SedanoE. (2022). El razonamiento de los adolescentes para gestionar las noticias falsas. Educación XX1 : revista de la Facultad de Educación, 25(2), 291–313. https://doi.org/10.5944/educxx1.31693
13.
CattellR. B. (1966). The scree test for the number of factors. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 1, 245–276. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327906mbr0102_10
14.
ChanR. Y. K. (2001). Determinants of Chinese consumers’ green purchase behavior. Psychology & Marketing, 18(4), 389–413. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.1013
CorbuN.OpreaD.-A.FrunzaruV. (2022). Romanian adolescents, fake news, and the third-person effect : A cross-sectional study. Journal of Children and Media, 16(3), 387–405. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2021.1992460
17.
CroneE. A.SteinbeisN. (2017). Neural perspectives on cognitive control development during childhood and adolescence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(3), 205–215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.01.003
FazioL. (2020). Pausing to consider why a headline is true or false can help reduce the sharing of false news. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 1(2), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-009
20.
FieldA. P. (2012). Discovering statistics using R. Sage.
21.
FinucaneM. L.GullionC. M. (2010). Developing a tool for measuring the decision-making competence of older adults. Psychology and Aging, 25(2), 271.
22.
FlammB. (2009). The impacts of environmental knowledge and attitudes on vehicle ownership and use. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 14 (4), 272–279.
GuessA.NaglerJ.TuckerJ. (2019). Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook. Science Advances, 5(1), Article eaau4586.
25.
HertzogC.SmithR. M.ArielR. (2018). Does the cognitive reflection test actually capture heuristic versus analytic reasoning styles in older adults?Experimental Aging Research, 44(1), 18–34.
26.
HopfH.KriefA.MehtaG.MatlinS. A. (2019). Fake science and the knowledge crisis: Ignorance can be fatal. Royal Society Open Science, 6(5), 190161.
27.
HornJ. L. (1965). A rationale and test for the number of factors in factor analysis. Psychometrika, 30, 179–185. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02289447
28.
HungerfordH. R.VolkT. L. (1990). Changing learner behavior through environmental education. Journal of Environmental Education, 21(3), 8–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00958964.1990.10753743
29.
KaiserH. F. (1960). The application of electronic computers to factor analysis. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20, 141–151. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/001316446002000116
30.
KaiserH. F. (1974). An index of factorial simplicity. Psychometrika, 39, 31–36.
31.
KimA.MoravecP. L.DennisA. R. (2019). Combating fake news on social media with source ratings: The effects of user and expert reputation ratings. Journal of Management Information Systems, 36(3), 931–968.
32.
KochT.FrischlichL.LermerE. (2021). The effects of warning labels and social endorsement cues on credibility perceptions of and engagement intentions with fake news. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fw3zq
KrugerJ.DunningD. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it : How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121
35.
LazerD. M.BaumM. A.BenklerY.BerinskyA. J.GreenhillK. M.MenczerF.MetzgerM.J.NyhanB.PennycookG.RothschildD.SchudsonM.SlomanS. A.SunsteinC. R.ThorsonE. A.WattsD. J.ZittrainJ. L. (2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), 1094–1096. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2998
36.
LewandowskyS. (2021). Climate change disinformation and how to combat it. Annual Review of Public Health, 42(1), 1–21.
37.
LiuP.TengM.HanC. (2020). How does environmental knowledge translate into pro-environmental behaviors? The mediating role of environmental attitudes and behavioral intentions. Science of the Total Environment, 728, 138126.
38.
LopezA.ShareJ. (2020). Fake climate news: How denying climate change is the ultimate in fake news. The Journal of Sustainability Education, 23, 1–11.
39.
MaertensR.AnseelF.van der LindenS. (2020). Combatting climate change misinformation: Evidence for longevity of inoculation and consensus messaging effects. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 70, 101455.
40.
PapapiccoC.LamannaI.D’ErricoF. (2022). Adolescents’ vulnerability to fake news and to racial hoaxes : A qualitative analysis on Italian sample. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 6(3), 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti6030020
41.
PehlivanogluD.LighthallN. R.LinT.ChiK. J.PolkR.PerezE.CahillB. S.EbnerN. C. (2022). Aging in an “infodemic”: The role of analytical reasoning, affect, and news consumption frequency on news veracity detection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 28(3), 468.
42.
PennycookG.EpsteinZ.MoslehM.ArecharA. A.EcklesD.RandD. G. (2021). Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online. Nature, 592(7855), 7855. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03344-2
43.
PennycookG.McPhetresJ.ZhangY.LuJ. G.RandD. G. (2020). Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media : Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy-nudge intervention. Psychological Science, 31(7), 770–780. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620939054
44.
PennycookG.RandD. G. (2019a). Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking. Journal of Personality, 88(2), 185–200. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12476
45.
PennycookG.RandD. G. (2019b). Lazy, not biased : Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.011
RanneyM. A.VelauthamL. (2021). Climate change cognition and education : Given no silver bullet for denial, diverse information-hunks increase global warming acceptance. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 42, 139–146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.08.001
48.
RideoutV.RobbM. B. (2019). The common sense census: Media use by tweens and teens, 2019. Common Sense Media.
49.
RobertsJ. A. (1996). Green consumers in the 1990s : Profile and implications for advertising. Journal of Business Research, 36(3), 217–231. https://doi.org/10.1016/0148-2963(95)00150-6
50.
RossiS.CassottiM.AgoguéM.De NeysW. (2013). Development of substitution bias sensitivity: Are adolescents happy fools?Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 35(35), 3321–3326.
51.
SchwartzD.LoewensteinG. (2017). The chill of the moment : Emotions and proenvironmental behavior. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 36(2), 255–268. https://doi.org/10.1509/jppm.16.132
52.
SindermannC.CooperA.MontagC. (2020). A short review on susceptibility to falling for fake political news. Current Opinion in Psychology, 36, 44–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.03.014
53.
StrudwickeI. J.GrantW. J. (2020). #JunkScience: Investigating pseudoscience disinformation in the Russian Internet Research Agency tweets. Public Understanding of Science, 29(5), 459–472. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662520935071
54.
TaddickenM.WolffL. (2023). Climate Change-related counter-attitudinal fake news exposure and its effects on search and selection behavior. Environmental Communication, 17(7), 720–739.
55.
ToplakM. E.FloraD. B. (2021). Resistance to cognitive biases: Longitudinal trajectories and associations with cognitive abilities and academic achievement across development. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 34(3), 344–358. https://doi.org/10.1002/BDM.2214
56.
VijaykumarS.JinY.RogersonD.LuX.SharmaS.MaughanA.FadelB.de Oliveira CostaM. S.PagliariC.MorrisD. (2021). How shades of truth and age affect responses to COVID-19 (mis) information: Randomized survey experiment among WhatsApp users in UK and Brazil. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1).
57.
WaldropM. M. (2017). The genuine problem of fake news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(48), 12631–12634. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1719005114
