Educated but easily fooled? Who falls for misinformation and why
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have identified who is most susceptible to online misinformation and why. Their meta-analysis reveals surprising patterns in how demographic and psychological factors—including age, education, political identity, analytical thinking, and motivated reflection—affect people's ability to assess the accuracy of information.
For instance, individuals with higher levels of education are just as likely to fall for misinformation as those with a lower level of education. The work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides important information for theory building and designing interventions.
Nearly 5 billion people worldwide receive their news from social media, and the impact of misinformation—especially on elections—is of increasing concern. Despite extensive research, it remains largely unclear who is particularly vulnerable to misinformation and why.
"There is a lot of research on misinformation right now, but with the volume of work, it has become increasingly difficult to see the connections between different factors," explains lead author Mubashir Sultan. The doctoral candidate at the Center for Adaptive Rationality researches misinformation and decision-making behavior online.
He and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis using data from the U.S., examining how factors such as education, age, gender, political identity, analytical thinking, partisan bias, motivated reflection, and familiarity with news have an impact on people's online misinformation veracity judgments.
The researchers found no significant impact of education on people's ability to distinguish between true and false information. This contradicts the widespread belief that more educated individuals are likely to be less susceptible to misinformation, especially as higher education teaches us critical thinking.
The study also challenges assumptions about age and misinformation. While older adults are often portrayed as more vulnerable to fake news, the analysis found that they were actually better than younger adults at distinguishing between true and false headlines. Older adults were also more skeptical and tended to label headlines as false more often.
Paradoxically, however, previous research has consistently shown that older adults engage with and share more misinformation online.
Political identity also played a key role. The meta-analysis confirmed previous research showing that individuals who identify as Republicans are more likely to fall for misinformation than those who identify as Democrats. Republicans were less accurate at assessing the veracity of news and tended to label more headlines as true, whereas Democrats were more skeptical.
Individuals with higher analytical thinking skills—that is, who are better at logically evaluating information, identifying patterns, and systematically solving problems—performed better overall and were more skeptical (tending to classify news as false). People were more likely to believe that news that aligned with their political identity was true and to disregard news that was not aligned with their political identity—a phenomenon known as partisan bias.
However, a counterintuitive finding was that individuals with higher analytical thinking were actually more susceptible to partisan bias. This tendency is known as motivated reflection, which is a cognitive process where individuals' analytical reasoning works against them to protect their pre-existing beliefs, values, or partisan affiliations.
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