Towards a dynamic social judgement theory – an experiment using fake news

Abstract

Fake news creates a distorted perception of reality, with surreptitious influence on beliefs, attitudes and decision making. It can lead to suboptimal decisions for individuals and society in general, and more perversely can lead people to stop believing in facts altogether. Countering fake news remains a challenge to both academics and practitioners alike, and this study contributes towards closing this practice-knowledge gap through the lens of social judgement theory. While social judgement theory is important and useful for understanding anchor shifts from the fake news phenomenon, it is in itself incomplete as an account of persuasion and overlooks the impact of time on anchors. The contribution of this study comes from introducing a dynamic element to social judgement theory, while adding to the body of knowledge in persuasion theory to counter the scourge of fake news. The research design was a full experimental research that utilised two pilot studies and a main study comprising 190 participants. The results of the experiment led to new findings that time is an important factor in shifting people’s anchors, despite no presence of a persuasive message as required by social judgement theory. The importance and benefits of longitudinal studies in persuasion is demonstrated as the conclusions drawn from this study could have been significantly different had it been a cross-sectional study, which typifies most studies in persuasion. Importantly, a comparison in a single study of the effects of messages questioning the source’s bias against social consensus in the form of user comments at the end of a blog-post, has received remarkably little attention in the field of persuasion. This study compares these two important and critical aspects of persuasion in a single experimental research over a three month period, and finds that both discounting cues on source bias and social consensus had the same effect on participant’s anchors over time, implying they could be used to equal effect to counter fake news. Although the study setting is fake news around climate change, it offers immense value in guiding resources towards countering fake news in other spheres of persuasion like politics and the tobacco industry.