Posted November 7, 2022 | Reviewed by Ekua HaganKey points- Experiments show that people share content on social media that they know is false.We also tend to overestimate others’ gullibility to fake news relative to our own, known as the third-person effect.Part of why I think this view is very unwise is because research evidence points to a much different psychological mechanism—that people will intentionally share misinformation with others while knowing that it is false.Educational Videos Do Not Reduce Sharing of MisinformationIn a field experiment by a team led by Alexander Bor, scientists studied how educational videos could inform Twitter users on how to detect fake news so that they would be less susceptible to it.The authors concluded, “In politically polarized settings, people may intentionally share conspiracy theories or other types of misinformation (e.g., rumors or fake news) to advance other motives (e.g., to signal their identity) … our findings suggest that social motives (e.g., signaling social identity or eliciting social engagement) play a critical role in accounting for people’s decisions to broadcast conspiracy theories.”Misinformation Itself Isn’t a Huge ProblemThese results challenge some of the widely held notions that people share misinformation on social media because they are gullible."