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Tinker Tailor Soldier Lie. Investigating Intra- and Extra-Individual Factors of Susceptibility to False Information

  • At least since the 2016 presidential elections in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, misinformation has gained increasing prominence in the public discourse. Only four years later, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and was accompanied by an “Infodemic”, misleading individuals about the origin of the virus, its severity, and the intentions of governments coping with the virus. Misinformation was itself deemed a considerable threat to public health. Although COVID-19 misinformation was widely circulating at that time, and continues to do so, a substantial share of individuals did not believe this misleading information. That begs the question, why do people fall for misinformation? This question is at the heart of this dissertation project, which explores the role of social media, trust, and values in individuals’ susceptibility to false information. Through comparative research, the project investigates how these variables affect the reception of misinformation and attempts to combine multiple levels of analysis and consider different forms of misinformation. The core of this dissertation consists of three chapters, each of which addresses the research question from a different but complementary perspective. Chapter 2 provides the conceptual basis for the subsequent empirical chapters. The chapter investigates how individual, group, and system-level variables contribute to social media’s role as a vector for misinformation. In the third chapter, I employ an experimental research design to assess whether superficial characteristics of different social media platforms affect users’ credibility judgements regarding manufactured news. Contrary to existing literature, the experiment’s results suggest that social media platforms do not differ in their effects on perceived credibility of news. The fourth chapter builds on data from a multinational research project that explored the role of values during the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on individuals’ propensity to believe in COVID-19-related conspiracy theories. Through a comparative design, using samples from Germany and Poland, the chapter finds considerable differences in the pattern of influential values and trust concepts on the adoption of conspiracy beliefs. Although the findings of this dissertation project come with limitations, the research nevertheless highlights the importance of comparative research designs in the study of misinformation. The dissertation concludes by discussing avenues for further research.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Christoph M. Abels
Advisor:Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Stephan Lewandowsky, Daniela Stockmann
Hertie Collections (Serial Number):Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School (03/2023)
Publication year:2023
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2023/05/11
Number pages:142
DOI:https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5013
Release Date:2023/06/12
Notes:
Shelf mark: 2023D003 + 2023D003+1
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Licence of document (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - 4.0 International
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