By Shawn Fuller

Contributing Writer

there is something in the content of fake news stories and rumors that connects with heightened emotions that is absent from factual stories.

Anything that repeats a falsehood, even if it includes a rebuttal, amplifies and spreads the falsehood. It is not just the trending algorithms that are gamed by propaganda but our own minds. The researchers Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, in a widely cited study for the MIT Media Lab, investigated the spread of all of the verified true and false news stories on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. They analyzed 126,000 stories tweeted more than 4.5 million times. They compared false stories and true stories, and those containing a mixture of true and false content. They used six different fact checking organizations: snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com, and urbanlegends.about.com to identify rumors as either true, false, or partly true. They found that false stories travel further than true ones: a false story was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than a true one; and it took an average of six times as long for true stories on Twitter to reach as many people as false ones. The false stories also travelled more widely.

There is something in the content of fake news stories and rumors that connects with heightened emotions that is absent from factual stories.

What is it about falsehoods that make them so viral? They seem to key into our emotions in some way that true stories don’t. The Psychologist Gordon Pennycook presented combinations of false and true news stories to people and asked them to judge each one as either true or false. He found that people in a heightened emotional state were more likely to judge false stories as true. It wasn’t only feelings of anger that impaired people’s reasoning.

False stories travel faster than true ones; it took an average of six times as long for true stories on Twitter to reach as many people as false ones. The false stories also travelled more widely.

When people feel positive emotions like inspired, strong, or proud they are as likely to misjudge fakes as those feeling negative emotions like scared, distressed, or ashamed. The level of emotion, however, did not influence people’s ability to assess real news stories. This suggests that there is something in the content of fake news stories and rumors that connects with heightened emotions that is absent from factual stories. We often assume that we are more likely to believe a false rumor if it matches our political bias. But Pennycook found heightened emotion had a much bigger effect. However, we are more likely to share a story if it matches our political beliefs, even if we are able to determine that it is false. False stories travel faster than true ones; it took an average of six times as long for true stories on Twitter to reach as many people as false ones. The false stories also travelled more widely.

False stories are more likely to trigger our instinct for novelty. Humans, and animals in general, are attuned to novelty because it often leads to opportunities and discovery. In the MIT study, the authors compared true and false rumours and found that the false ones were more novel, in terms of the information they contained. When they applied sentiment analysis they found that sharers of false stories expressed greater surprise and disgust than sharers of true rumours.