Falling for fake news: the role of political bias and cognitive ability

Abstract

Through a nationally representative survey involving 855 social media users in Singapore, this study proposes and tests a framework to explain why people believe in fake news. Guided by work on dual process models that theorize that individuals engage in either thorough or automatic processing, this study finds that both cognitive ability and political bias predict the extent to which individuals fall for fake news. While both exert direct effects on the extent to which individuals believe in fake news, they also exert indirect effects through how they lead individuals to different news consumption patterns.