Someone you love has a stroke, and overnight you become the family’s researcher. You scroll late-night threads, sorting real guidance from stroke misinformation, because a familiar-sounding myth could steer a real decision.
That closeness should make you harder to fool. A new study found the opposite. For younger adults with a stroke in the family, it loosened their guard instead of sharpening it.
The work comes out of Central China Normal University (CCNU) in Wuhan, China. There, researchers asked who falls hardest for stroke misinformation online.
Stroke made a pointed test case. It ranks among the country’s top causes of lasting disability.
Common sense says the people closest to a disease read claims about it most carefully. Hanshu Zhang, a psychologist at CCNU and a lead author, found that assumption cracks in one group.
Earlier research had pinned the highest risk on older or less-educated readers, casting younger, web-fluent users as the harder targets. This study put a real dent in that picture.
To measure judgment, the team pulled roughly 740 stroke posts from Weibo, China’s vast social media platform, across five years.
They trimmed the pile to 89 and rewrote each as a short statement, true or false. Volunteers marked each one.
From those answers the researchers separated two things that usually blur together: plain accuracy, and the private bar a person sets before believing a claim – a threshold that can...
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