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Abstract The efficacy of fake news corrections in improving memory and belief accuracy may depend on how often adults see false information before it is corrected. Two experiments tested the competing predictions that repeating fake news before corrections will either impair or improve memory and belief accuracy. These experiments also examined whether fake news exposure effects would differ for younger and older adults due to age-related differences in the recollection of contextual details. Younger and older adults read real and fake news headlines that appeared once or thrice. Next, they identified fake news corrections among real news headlines. Later, recognition and cued recall tests assessed memory for real news, fake news, if corrections occurred, and beliefs in retrieved details. Repeating fake news increased detection and remembering of corrections, correct real news retrieval, and erroneous fake news retrieval. No age differences emerged for detection of corrections, but younger adults remembered corrections better than older adults. At test, correct fake news retrieval for earlier-detected corrections was associated with better real news retrieval. This benefit did not differ between age groups in recognition but was greater for younger than older adults in cued recall. When detected corrections were not remembered at test, repeated fake news increased memory errors. Overall, both age groups believed correctly retrieved real news more than erroneously retrieved fake news to a similar degree. These findings suggest that fake news repetition effects on subsequent memory accuracy depended on age differences in recollection-based retrieval of fake news and that it was corrected.
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Exploring the Relationship between Quantitative Reasoning Skills and News Habits
Because people are constantly confronted with numbers and mathematical concepts in the news, we have embarked on a project to create journalism that can support news users’ number skills. But doing so requires understanding (1) journalists’ ability to reason with numbers, (2) other adults’ ability to do so, and (3) the attributes and affordances of news. In this paper, we focus on the relationship between adults’ news habits and their quantitative reasoning skills. We collected data from a sample of 1,200 US adults, testing their ability to interpret statistical results and asking them to report their news habits. The assessment we developed differentiated the skills of adults in our sample and conformed to the theoretical and statistical assumption that such skills are normally distributed in the population overall. We also found that respondents could be clustered into six distinct groups on the basis of news repertoires (overall patterns of usage, including frequency of news use overall and choice of news outlets). As often assumed in the literature on quantitative reasoning, these news repertoires predicted quantitative reasoning skills better than the amount of quantification in the outlets, but they still predicted only a small fraction of the variance. These results may suggest that news habits may play a smaller or less direct role in quantitative reasoning than has previously been assumed. We speculate that the presence (or absence) of quantification in everyday activities – namely work and hobbies – may be a better predictor of adults’ quantitative reasoning, as may additional dimensions of news habits and affective responses to numbers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1906802
- PAR ID:
- 10392448
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Numeracy
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1936-4660
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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