Study: You Create Your Own Misinformation
Besides news outlets, political propaganda, and social media, there is another, more surprising source of misinformation: you.
According to research from Ohio State University, people given accurate statistics on controversial issues tend to misremember data to fit their own beliefs.
“People can self-generate their own misinformation. It doesn’t all come from external sources,” lead study author Jason Coronel, an assistant professor of communications, said in a statement.
And then they spread those lies—often unintentionally—circulating fiction instead of fact.
“They may not be doing it purposely, but their own biases can lead them astray,” Coronel explained. “And the problem becomes larger when they share their self-generated misinformation with others.”
Joined by Ohio State doctoral students Shannon Poulsen and Matthew Sweitzer, Coronel conducted two studies, published online recently in the journal Human Communication Research.
The first presented 110 participants with short written descriptions of four societal issues involving numerical information.
Two were consistent with how people viewed the topics (e.g. folks generally expect more Americans to support same-sex marriage than oppose it), while two were not (e.g. the number of Mexican immigrants in the US declined recently).
After reading the descriptions, participants were asked to write down the numbers they remembered from all four points. More often than not, correct answers correlated with how the masses view the world, rather than those at odds with public opinion.
“We had instances where participants got the numbers exactly correct … but they would flip them around,” according to Coronel.
“They weren’t guessing—they got the numbers right,” he said. “But their biases were leading them to misremember the direction they were going.”
Eye-tracking technology employed during the study proved people “really were paying attention” when they read the statistics.
When participants arrived at numbers that didn’t meet their expectations, their eyes flitted back and forth, as if asking “What’s going on?” That typically did not happen when data confirmed presumptions.
In a second study, the team investigated how these memory distortions spread and grow more garbled—like a childhood game of “Telephone.”
The first person in the chain saw accurate statistics about the downward trend in Mexican immigrants living in the US. They transcribed those numbers from memory, then passed them along to the second person, who had to memorize and write the digits before handing them off to a third, and so on.
By the end of the sequence, the average participant said the number of Mexican immigrants had increased from 2007 to 2014 by about 4.6 million (when, in actuality, it decreased by some 1.1 million).
“These memory errors tended to get bigger and bigger as they were transmitted between people,” Sweitzer said.
Researchers admit that limitations like a lack of data explanations and pre-existing bias measurements may have blurred the study outcome a bit. But the results, the team said, still highlight the danger of self-invented fake news.
“We need to realize that internal sources of misinformation can possibly be as significant as or more significant than external sources,” Poulsen said. “We live with our biases all day, but we only come into contact with false information occasionally.”
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