Who Falls for Fake News? (opens in new tab)

Far be it from me to criticize Cambridge University, but it's an absurd way to test "susceptibility to fake news". They present a series of headlines independent of any context and ask if they're legitimate or not. This completely eliminates the actual metric for susceptibility to fake news, which is the inclination and ability to conduct research from reputable sources. This test is measuring if people's existing biases align with reality, and, to some extent, their ability to guess. Garbage.

I'd have said either "kind of everybody" or "a lot of us".

HNers tend to be younger, I think, but I remember newspapers handling the McMartin Day Care case pretty badly. And how about the leadup to Gulf War II?

Related:

Who isn't a big fan of "impartial" news? People who don't have power (48 points, 17 hours ago, 77 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43627877

Who falls for fake news? Psychological and clinical profiling evidence (2022) (33 points, 1 year ago, 53 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38158604

Individual bit of information are not the real issue. What is important is allowing oneself to be slowly primed to certain viewpoints and then accepting things via confirmation bias. Even the preceding is probably too simplistic, I think various human perception "bugs" are used to sway opinions.

the very serous problem is that so much of our world is built on constructs, such as the easter bunny, and money, both following internaly consistant(but arbitrary) rules, but having no natural indipendent reality with which to verify them from, so without any clear definition of what reality consists of, the fallback position for many people is to treat "new" information as a loyalty test, much of the current news is framed as a literal loyalty test, so?, what does anybody expect?

this is hilarious, you define misinformation as things that go against mainstream consensus. Yes, please -- Believe everything you're told.

You're not testing peoples ability to separate wheat from chaff, you're just diffing your world view to others with the assumption you're correct.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not a conspiracy nut, but if the last 5 years hasn't showed you that the mainstream consensus has large amounts of what the powers be wants you to believe, then your brain is toast. -- Theres no implicit binary here either, use some nuance.

completely junk "study"

Who falls for fake news? Anyone who aligns themselves with a political party.