DONT' BE FOOLED BY FAKE NEWS? MAPPING THE SOCIAL, COGNITIVE, AND POLITICAL MECHANISMS OF MISINFORMATION BELIEF.

Why do people believe in fake news? I explore this question using five studies on more than 4200 participants. While there is extensive research on this question, most studies have primarily tried to identify specific individual mechanisms, e.g. cognitive styles, without considering the possible interplay of various mechanisms. Instead, this dissertation has jointly considered five drivers of misinformation beliefs: cognitive styles, motivated reasoning, anti-elitism, institutional trust, and social norms. The second contribution of this doctoral thesis is the inclusion of these latter three explanations (one of which - social norms - is also experimentally manipulated), as the literature often focused on cognitive drivers while only rarely exploring social ones. This dissertation also aimed to make relevant methodological contributions. First, instead of using artificial or semiartificial stimuli to test participants’ truth discernment, it collected and validated a new dataset of 80 existing social media posts. Second, it also tested its hypotheses in Italy, outside the widely explored context of English-speaking countries. The results of these studies indicate that cognitive styles, such as the tendency to rely on intuition or analytical thinking, significantly influence participants’ ability to discern truth, even when using real social media posts as stimuli. However, the effects of other drivers were less pronounced. Motivated reasoning, for instance, had only marginal effects, possibly due to the low perceived partisanship of the collected posts. Similarly, I found no consistently significant effects of anti-elitism and institutional trust, except for trust in universities. Regarding social norms, I observed that individual motivations for information accuracy were associated with higher truth discernment, while social expectations had no discernible impact. The social norm treatment message yielded mixed results but was largely inconclusive. My findings have two main insights: for methodological issues, my thesis testifies to the importance of using more realistic stimuli selection in experimental research on misinformation; for substantive issues, my study shows that cognitive drivers, although crucial, cannot be considered the sole determinants for misinformation beliefs.