Mindsets and Politically Motivated Reasoning about Fake News

False information is sometimes published intentionally to mislead the public opinion, and it is often difficult to detect. A particular challenge is ideologically loaded fake news. As the result of an ideological belief bias, where people are more inclined to accept information that agrees with their prior beliefs, many people fail to detect fake news when it conforms with their political views. Building on the mindset theory of action phases, this research investigates the role of motivational states in moderating the ideological belief bias. We tested two competing predictions to study the motivational processes implicated in fake news detection. Motivated reasoning accounts posit that deliberation should reinforce the ideological belief bias, because reasoning about politics primarily serves to defend and rationalize one’s position. An opposing view, based on dual-process theory, assumes that deliberation attenuates the ideological belief bias because deliberation facilitates an unbiased assessment of new information. An online-experiment (N = 497) tested these competing accounts. Participants were induced with deliberative/implemental mindsets prior to rating the veracity of (true/fake) news headlines. Importantly, some headlines favored a politically conservative view; others leant toward a liberal perspective. Based on self-reported political preference (Democrat vs. Republican), headlines were categorized as congruent or incongruent with participants’ political views. We replicated a pattern of correct identification of true/fake news that was consistent with an ideological belief bias. Participants were more accepting of news that conformed with their political views. Specifically, compared to incongruent news, participants rated congruent true news more frequently as true, and they were more likely to fail to detect favorable fake news. In the main analysis, mindsets did not moderate the ideological belief bias, but showed interesting relationships with cognitive reflection and dishonest behavior. Further exploration based on a signal-detection perspective suggested that a deliberative mindset could promote fake news detectability. Data collection of the present study was funded by PsychLab, a service of the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID). notReviewed other