A person’s education level has little impact on their ability to identify misinformation on the internet.
Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development analysed more than 250,000 decisions made by almost 12,000 Americans across 31 experiments between 2006 and 2023 to find out who was most susceptible to online misinformation.
Lead author Mubashir Sultan said the meta-analysis revealed surprising patterns on how demographic and psychological factors, including age, education, political identity, analytical thinking, and motivated reflection, affected people’s ability to assess the accuracy of information.
“For instance, individuals with higher levels of education are just as likely to fall for misinformation as those with a lower level of education,” Mr Sultan said.
He said nearly five billion people worldwide received their news from social media, and the impact of misinformation was of increasing concern.
“There is a lot of research on misinformation right now, but with the volume of work, it has become increasingly difficult to see the connections between different factors.”
Mr Sultan said the fact their research found no significant impact of education on people’s ability to distinguish between true and false information, contradicted the widespread belief that more educated individuals were likely to be less susceptible to misinformation, especially as higher education teaches us critical thinking.
He said the study also challenged assumptions about age and misinformation.
“While older adults are often portrayed as more vulnerable to fake news, the analysis found that they were actually better than younger adults at distinguishing between true and false headlines.
“Older adults were also more skeptical and tended to label headlines as false more often.”
Mr Sultan said political identity also played a key role, with people more likely to believe that news that aligned with their political identity was true and to disregard news that was not aligned with their political identity, a phenomenon known as partisan bias.
“However, a counterintuitive finding was that individuals with higher analytical thinking were actually more susceptible to partisan bias.
“This tendency is known as motivated reflection, which is a cognitive process where individuals’ analytical reasoning works against them to protect their pre-existing beliefs, values, or partisan affiliations.”
Read the full study: Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors.
