Fighting false information : investigating the effect of perceptual disfluency on profundity judgement

Abstract

The proliferation of misinformation over social media has negative implications on individual and societal levels, meriting investigations into how susceptibility to false or meaningless claims can be reduced. This dissertation examined whether the effects of (i) perceptual disfluency, (ii) cognitive style and (iii) social endorsement on social media influenced receptivity to pseudo profound “bullshit” statements. Perceptual fluency was manipulated by presenting bullshit statements in an illegible font. Font manipulation and analytic cognitive style were expected to prompt a more critical assessment of the statements’ logical validity. Furthermore, it was predicted that statements with low social endorsement would be viewed as less profound. Participants rated the profundity of 40 quotes embedded as Facebook posts with varying amounts of Facebook Likes, Comments and Shares. The quotes were constructed as pseudo-profound or meaningful statements and were presented in different fonts. Cognitive style was measured through a 7-item Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) before the main task. Perceptual disfluency and social endorsement did not affect bullshit receptivity, and although analytic cognitive style reduced overall receptivity, this was not limited to pseudo-profound statements. Laboratory sessions using eye-tracking measures suggested that the disfluent font was relatively harder to read, but the manipulations used may have been ineffective to induce required cognitive load to serve as a metacognitive cue, characterized by larger pupil sizes. This implies that the disfluency effect may be bound to certain conditions and warrants further investigations in this area.