When political news stories contradict what readers expect from a specific media outlet, those readers tend to think harder about the information and become better at spotting false claims. A recent pair of experiments demonstrated that this mental mismatch prompts people to evaluate the content more thoroughly, leading them to reject inaccurate statements they might have otherwise believed. These findings were published in Communication Research Reports.
For years, scholars have tried to understand why false political information spreads so easily online. Many early studies looked at how people react to corrections after they have already accepted a false claim. Recently, communication researchers have started to evaluate the specific mental processes that occur the exact moment a person encounters questionable news.
Diane Jackson, a researcher at Purdue University, and Jennifer Hoewe, an associate professor at the university, wanted to test a newly proposed framework. This conceptual framework maps out how individuals recognize flawed information in real time. It suggests that personal traits and situational factors dictate whether a reader will notice a factual problem in a news story.
A primary concept in this process is cognitive coherence. Coherence occurs when a new piece of information perfectly matches a person’s existing beliefs or expectations. When a reader sees a headline from a favored news organization and the article confirms their worldview, their brain...
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