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  3. Cultural Consistency as A Predictor of Sharing and Engaging With Misinformation and Inciting News

Cultural Consistency as A Predictor of Sharing and Engaging With Misinformation and Inciting News

Why do certain pieces of misinformation and inciting news receive more engagement and spread more widely?

Research

Research project

This project develops a novel way to understand why certain misinformation and inciting news receives more engagement and spreads further. It combines insights from cognitive psychology (familiarity heuristic) and sociology (schema consistency) to theorize and empirically test the role of cultural consistency factors in news virality.

The project innovates by repurposing a research design for cultural consistency in the service of studying and identifying solutions to the spread of and engagement with such information. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that individuals are more likely to share and engage with news containing false or inciting information that aligns with shared cultural narratives using online quasi-field experiments in four different countries (France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S.). We use the results to develop a method for predicting which news is likely to draw engagement and spread that can help to optimize the use of scarce fact-checking and moderation resources.

Project funding

SAB 2024 (Sciences Po)

Partner institution

University of Copenhagen (Centre for Social Data Science)