Understanding Persuasive Communication: The Role of Heuristic Thinking, Context, and Debiasing in the Evaluation of Online Political Information

The technological revolution brought about by the Internet has affected numerous aspects of our everyday life, including the way we conceive and perform information and communication practices. In this sense, the Internet has drastically reduced the cost of data accessibility and data sharing, by increasing both the amount of information freely available for consultation and the speed at which it is possible to access and exchange it. Social Networking Platforms (SNPs) – such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – are of particular interest in this sense, having become fully-fledged information environments themselves in the last decade, with an increasing number of individuals identifying such platforms as their main source for news, including political news. Given such an informative role, SNPs have attracted increasing attention regarding the proliferation of propaganda – definable as information that, though not necessarily fabricated, is specifically designed to rally public support and disparage opposing views rather than serve an informative purpose. Even though compelling evidence has revealed the widespread tendency of political actors to employ automated tools to propagate this kind of content on SNPs, scholars have also demonstrated how social media users themselves play a crucial role in this proliferation. Thus, understanding how individuals interact with and are affected by these information environments is of crucial importance to untangle the functioning of this political communication phenomenon. In particular, identifying the mechanisms underlying the evaluation of political propaganda has major relevance not only for the assessment of the persuasive power this communication practice exerts, but also for the development of countermeasures able to mitigate its impact on social media users’ deliberations. Therefore, the main aim of this doctoral research is to unravel the functioning of this multidimensional phenomenon by adopting a cognitive-sociological approach that draws on the Dual Process Model of Cognition when theoretically conceptualizing and empirically assessing the effectiveness of this communication practice. By addressing the specific cognitive mechanisms that regulate information processing, the goal is to assess whether reasoning style – and, in particular, heuristic thinking – affects judgments concerning the validity and shareability of political propaganda, thus enhancing its circulation. Given the goals of this project and the characteristics of the phenomenon under investigation, a mixed-methods approach encompassing computational social science techniques and experimental design has been adopted to explore the role played by reasoning in this kind of persuasion processes. The first set of methods has been employed to collect and analyze social media data on the 2019 European Parliament elections to assess the extent to which automation (i.e., political bots) and heuristic-based persuasion strategies have been employed consistently by political actors. Results indicate the presence of both factors among the political communication techniques deployed for this electoral event. Building on these findings, the second set of methods has been employed to design and implement a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE). By means of this experimental technique – which is designed to elicit individual preferences in contexts where revealed preference data is unavailable – it was possible to assess how individuals interpret and respond to online propaganda messages and which factors affect this evaluation process. Two main factors have been explored in this sense, namely message features of online propaganda and the cognitive context in which information processing takes place. Specifically, this experimental assessment concerned six different informational cues (i.e., source, endorsement, popularity, emotional salience, stereotyping, and moral valence) and two different cognitive contexts (i.e., a “cognitive scarcity” and a “debiasing” one, in which heuristic thinking and analytic reasoning were prompted respectively). Findings highlighted that both message features and the cognitive context in which evaluation is performed affect the likelihood of considering political messages valid and shareable on SNPs. Moreover, they also indicate that individual characteristics ascribable to supra-individual, cultural factors (e.g., perception of diversity) moderate such an effect. Overall, this research project and its outputs contribute to the existing literature on online propaganda by exploring the mechanisms underlying the persuasion processes triggered by this political communication practice. By adopting a research approach that puts recipients at the center of the investigation without neglecting the social context they are part of, this work proposes a suitable way to investigate the functioning of online propaganda and, thus, assess its actual effectiveness.