Beyond Cognitive Ability: Susceptibility to Fake News Is Also Explained by Associative Inference

Abstract

We conducted a preliminary online study (N=261) investigating whether people's susceptibility to fake news on social media depends on how fake news are associated with real news that they viewed previously, as well as individuals' cognitive ability. Across two phases, we varied the association in three between-subjects conditions, i.e., associative inference, repetition, and irrelevant (control). Our study results showed limited impact of association type on participants of low cognitive ability. In contrast, for participants of high cognitive ability, their discrimination of fake news from real news tended to be worse for the associative inference condition than for the other two conditions. Thus, our findings suggest that individuals of high cognitive ability are likely to be susceptible to form the belief of fake news, but differently from those of low cognitive ability.