BrainSigns - ANSA Conference "Information and technology in the fight against Fake News"
In Ernst & Young’s Wavespace in Rome, BrainSigns recently carried out an experiment on the perception of "fake news" with a group of young people (20-35 years old) while viewing some news online. The test was carried out using eye-tracking and facial-coding technologies available in the Wavespace laboratory.
The results were presented by prof. Fabio Babiloni at the conference "Information and technology in the fight against Fake News", organized by ANSA with EY (19 November 2020).
During the experiment, participants were shown 10 news on a computer in random order, five were real news and five were 'fake' news.
Before viewing the news, the participants' psychological traits, specifically conscientiousness, open-mindedness and emotional stability of the participants, were evaluated through a psychometric test (Implicit Association Test).
The results obtained were interesting:
- People who were more inclined to consider fake news as true showed a psychological profile characterized by intuitive rather than reflective thinking. When exposed to fake news, they often experienced feelings of 'surprise', clearly more than the others, for whom a reaction of 'perplexity' was more common.
- It was also found that the group more inclined to believe fake news focused on "emotional" elements of the news such as images rather than on the written text.
In summary, the results of the experiment suggest that people who are more inclined to believe fake news generally show a higher level of emotionality and a more intuitive than reflective reasoning style.
This means, for example, that a practical way to limit the negative impact of fake news could be to "prevent" the immediate sharing of news on several platforms by displaying messages that encourage users to "think before sharing". According to current scientific literature, it is estimated to reduce the sharing of fake news on the web by up to 20%.
