Fake News and True News Assessment: The Persuasive Effect of Discursive Evidence in Judging Veracity

Abstract

Individuals are often unable to assess the veracity of news claims—especially on social media platforms. Recent research has suggested that interventions indicating normative signals, such as flagging false claims, are not always effective. We propose an approach in which users are provided with discursive evidence to consider in determining the veracity of claims rather than depending on normative true or false flags. We conducted a series of experiments to explore the effects of different forms of discursive evidence on individual judgments of the veracity of news claims. We found that providing such evidence can significantly improve individuals’ judgment of both true and false news claims—with certain caveats. Providing discursive evidence with high evidence strength leads to a general increase in veracity judgment. Discursive evidence containing items with lower evidence strength may shift believability— thus improving judgments for either true or false claims but degrading them for the other. We also identify important asymmetries between true and false claims, finding that the effect of some evidence may be improved if people are in a more critical mindset—for example, by priming them to think about the concept of truth and lies. Taken together, these results extend knowledge on the problem of fake news and may suggest effective approaches to address the problem without diminishing attention to true news.