Psychologists at the University of Würzburg have studied what makes people more susceptible to fake news.
Psychologists at the University of Würzburg have studied what makes people more susceptible to fake news. People who deny the existence of facts believe in fake news more often. Particularly often affected are people with dark personality traits - those who always put their own benefit first. These are the findings of a new study at the Institute for Human-Computer Media at the University of Würzburg. Some people believe fake news even when the scientific facts clearly speak against it," says psychologist Jan Philipp Rudloff. "We wanted to know why this is so and what role ideas about the nature of knowledge and facts play in this." Rudloff, who is doing his doctorate in the department of communication psychologist Professor Markus Appel, conducted an extensive experiment on this question. In it, he and his professor confronted more than 600 test subjects from the U.S. with various short messages - such as , "In the first three years under Trump, 1.5 million fewer jobs were created than in the last three years of Obama's term." Participants were asked to judge the truth of these statements.
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