Why do people share fake news?
Whether a headline is true shapes what people think of it far more than whether they pass it on. Four lines of experiments explain the gap.
Answer to the question
Why do people share fake news?
People share fake news for reasons that differ from belief. Experiments show that attention is often on something other than accuracy, that sharing becomes an automatic habit when it is rewarded, that repetition makes a headline feel less wrong to pass on, and that a story can be interesting if true and useful between friends.
Key takeaways
- Pennycook and colleagues (2021) found across four survey experiments that whether a headline was true had little effect on whether people said they would share it, though it strongly shaped their accuracy judgments.
- In the Ceylan and colleagues study (2023), with 2,476 participants, the 15 per cent with the strongest sharing habits accounted for roughly 30 to 40 per cent of the false headlines shared.
- In the fourth Ceylan study, rewards for sharing accurate news improved the sharing of true over false headlines, and the change carried into later sessions without rewards.
- Effron and Raj (2020) found that repeated exposure made fake-news headlines seem less unethical to publish and share, even when the headlines were labelled false and disbelieved.
- Altay and colleagues (2022) found that fake stories scored high on interestingness-if-true, which helps explain why willingness to share them was not much lower than for true stories.
Most people say it matters that a news story is accurate before they pass it on. Yet when shown a set of headlines and asked which ones they would share, people let truth change the answer very little, although truth strongly shapes their judgments of accuracy. Why people share fake news starts there.
Saying and Sharing Come Apart
Gordon Pennycook and colleagues reported the gap in a paper in the journal Nature. Across four survey experiments, the truth of a headline had little effect on whether people said they would share it, even though truth strongly shaped their judgments of its accuracy. The majority of participants also said it was important to share only accurate news. The authors concluded that sharing does not necessarily reflect belief, and that people often share fake news through accuracy inattention, with their attention on other things when the choice comes up.
A field experiment on a social network tested that reading. A subtle prompt toward accuracy improved the quality of the news people went on to share. The nudge was light, which fits the authors' view that the value was already there and the attention was elsewhere.
The separation in that 2021 paper has a practical consequence for how fake news is discussed. A person can judge a story inaccurate and still pass it on, so counting the people who believe fake news does not count the people who spread it. Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, wrote Foolproof, which works on the belief side of the problem: how people come to accept falsehoods, and how earlier contact with weakened examples might build resistance. The studies in this piece concern the step after belief, the act of passing something on.
Whether a headline is true shapes what people think of it far more than whether they pass it on.
Habit Drives Much of Sharing
Gizem Ceylan and colleagues, among them the habit researcher Wendy Wood, asked whether sharing fake news is mostly a matter of lazy reasoning or bias. Their four studies, with 2,476 people who held social media accounts, had participants decide whether to share 16 simulated headlines. The researchers measured how automatic each person's sharing habit was, using self-reported automaticity and past sharing frequency. Because the headlines were a mix of true and false, the researchers could also see discernment, meaning how well each person's sharing separated the two.
Stronger habits went with sharing more headlines overall and with less sensitivity to whether a headline was true. In the Ceylan study, the 15 per cent of participants with the strongest habits accounted for roughly 30 to 40 per cent of the false headlines shared, depending on how habit was measured. Asking habitual sharers to judge accuracy first did not remove the pattern.
The authors explain this through reward learning. People learn to share content that attracts attention, and once the habit forms, cues in the setting trigger habitual sharing with little regard for whether the content is true. In habit research a habit is a response that a setting triggers automatically after repeated reward, which fits the finding that a prompt to think about accuracy did little for the strongest sharers.
A fourth study trained participants with rewards for sharing accurate news. They became better at sharing true over false headlines, and the change carried into later sessions without rewards. Training that rewarded sharing falsehoods reduced the ability to tell them apart. Accuracy training did not cut how often people shared, and it slightly raised it.
Repetition Lowers the Moral Bar
A headline met again feels different from one met for the first time. Daniel Effron and Medha Raj ran experiments, two of them preregistered, in which people met fake-news headlines once or several times. Repeated exposure made a headline seem less unethical to publish and share, even when it was labelled false and participants did not believe it. Lower perceived unethicality went with greater willingness to approve of the headline online, and repeated headlines were shared more than new ones.
Repetition is already known to raise belief in a statement, a point covered in [What is cognitive ease?](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-is-cognitive-ease). The design here goes further. Participants who disbelieved a headline labelled false still found it less wrong to share after repeated exposure, so the shift in moral judgment did not depend on a shift in belief. The authors suggest that repetition can make blatant misinformation feel intuitively true, which softens moral condemnation. On that account familiarity changes what people feel about passing a story on, as well as what they believe about it.
Worth Sharing If True
Accuracy ratings leave one factor out. Sacha Altay and colleagues added it in three experiments in which participants saw ten news stories in random order, five true and five fake, and rated each for accuracy, for how interesting it would be if true, and for how willing they were to share it. Interestingness-if-true proved distinct from general interestingness. Fake stories were rated less accurate than true ones, yet they scored high on interestingness-if-true, and the authors argue this helps explain why people were not much less willing to share them. Willingness to share still rose with perceived accuracy.
A repeated headline can feel less wrong to share even when the sharer does not believe it.
A story that would matter a great deal if it were true gives a reason to pass it on before checking it, which sits easily beside the attention and habit findings.
Andrew Duffy and colleagues looked at the other side of the exchange: the tie linking whoever sends a story to whoever receives it. News passed to a friend can strengthen a social bond, they note, and a false story can strain that bond once the error comes out. Their twelve focus groups examined cases where a person forwards a story without knowing or suspecting it is false, and their frame treats the act as one that happens among people as well as a way of reaching an audience. The work asks what follows for the relationship, for both sender and receiver, when a story passed on in good faith proves untrue.
Common questions
Why do people share fake news?
Experiments point to several causes working together. Attention is often on something other than accuracy when the choice arrives, sharing becomes an automatic habit when it is rewarded, repetition makes a headline feel less wrong to pass on, and a story can be interesting if true. Sharing also carries social meaning between sender and receiver.
Do people who share fake news believe it?
Not necessarily. In the experiments by Pennycook and colleagues, truth had little effect on sharing intentions but a strong effect on accuracy judgments. In the work by Effron and Raj, repeated headlines seemed less unethical to share even when they were labelled false and participants did not believe them.
Can the sharing habit change?
In one experiment by Ceylan and colleagues, rewards for sharing accurate news improved the sharing of true over false headlines, and the change carried into later sessions without rewards. Pennycook and colleagues found that a subtle accuracy prompt improved the quality of news shared in a field experiment. Both are results from the studies described, not forecasts for other settings.
Does repetition make fake news seem true?
In the experiments by Effron and Raj, repeated exposure made fake-news headlines seem less unethical to share, even when people knew the headline was labelled false. The authors suggest repetition can make a headline feel intuitively true. The belief side of repetition is covered in the article on cognitive ease.
Sources
van der Linden, S. (2023). Foolproof. Seed book.
Pennycook, G., Epstein, Z., Mosleh, M., Arechar, A. A., Eckles, D., & Rand, D. G. (2021). “Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online.” Nature, 592(7855), 590-595. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03344-2 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03344-2
Ceylan, G., Anderson, I. A., & Wood, W. (2023). “Sharing of misinformation is habitual, not just lazy or biased.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(4), e2216614120. doi:10.1073/pnas.2216614120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216614120
Effron, D. A., & Raj, M. (2020). “Misinformation and morality: Encountering fake-news headlines makes them seem less unethical to publish and share.” Psychological Science, 31(1), 75-87. doi:10.1177/0956797619887896 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619887896
Altay, S., de Araujo, E., & Mercier, H. (2022). “If this account is true, it is most enormously wonderful: Interestingness-if-true and the sharing of true and false news.” Digital Journalism, 10(3), 373-394. doi:10.1080/21670811.2021.1941163 https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1941163
Duffy, A., Tandoc, E., & Ling, R. (2020). “Too good to be true, too good not to share: The social utility of fake news.” Information, Communication & Society, 23(13), 1965-1979. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1623904 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1623904