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Can TMT Explain our Vulnerability to Fake News?


A recent article found that computer algorithms can reliably distinguish between authentic and false news stories based on characteristics of the language used in the articles. The authors reported that “Specifically, legitimate news in tabloid and entertainment magazines seem to use more first person pronouns, talk about time, and use positive emotion words, which interestingly were also found as markers of truth-tellers in previous work on deception detection (Perez-Rosas and Mihalcea, 2014). On the other hand, fake content in this domain has a predominant use of second person pronouns (he, she), negative emotion words and focus on the present” (p. 9). It should be noted that in this study the authors constructed the true and fake news stories, but the characteristics that differentiated them may  still help to understand how fake news works in real-life communication. In this study, human raters were still fooled by the artificially generated fake news content about 30% of the time.

In Kahneman’s (2011) formulation of Two Minds Theory (TMT), System 1 — what we call the Intuitive System — is more easily fooled because it uses simple biases and heuristics to make decisions. Greater use of negative emotion words in fake news may suggest a tendency to play on people’s negative emotions, has been suggested as a vulnerability of the Intuitive System both in Kahneman’s version of the TMT. In our version of the TMT centered on the concept of temporal immediacy, a focus on the present in fake news also would be considered more consistent with the intuitive system. These findings therefore might be taken to suggest that the Intuitive System is more easily fooled, again in line with Kahneman’s overall argument.

Counter to this general line of thinking, our version of TMT would suggest that the use of first-person pronouns (I) is more immediate than third-person pronouns (he, she), and therefore more consistent with the Intuitive System. In this example, the article’s findings could suggest that the Intuitive System’s gut reactions are actually less vulnerable to deception than the Narrative System. Because all formulations of TMT identify emotions as Intuitive-level processes, the presence of positive emotions in genuine news might also be seen as an Intuitive-System cue.

Overall, then, the findings of this study on fake news have interesting intersections with TMT, but do not cleanly align one system with truth and the other system with falsity. Instead, it appears that both systems are implicated in people’s tendency to fall for fake news, although each system makes mistakes in its own way. The Intuitive System, as noted by Kahneman and others, can be fooled by negative emotions and a focus on current details without proper perspective. But the Narrative System also can be fooled by someone who uses abstraction to spin a good story and to distance listeners from their own experiences. Our formulation of TMT attempts to move away from simple dualisms in which one system always produces better results, and instead to look for the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.

To counteract the effects of fake news, it might be possible to train readers to look for signs of immediacy such as first-person pronouns because these can be signs of honest reporting, but to be wary of content that focuses only on the present and particularly of present-focused content that attempts to arouse negative emotions like fear and sadness. Learning to look for immediacy cues in language might help us all become better at differentiating truth from lies.

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