If this account is true, it is most enormously wonderful: Interestingness-if-true and the sharing of true and false news
Altay, de Araujo and Mercier report three experiments in which participants viewed ten news stories in random order, five true and five fake, and rated each for accuracy, for interestingness-if-true and for willingness to share. Interestingness-if-true proved distinct from general interestingness. Participants rated fake stories as less accurate than true ones, and were more willing to share stories they saw as more accurate, but fake stories still scored high on interestingness-if-true, which the authors say helps explain why people did not intend to share fake news much less than true news.
Altay, de Araujo and Mercier report three experiments in which participants viewed ten news stories in random order, five true and five fake, and rated each for accuracy, for interestingness-if-true and for willingness to share. Interestingness-if-true proved distinct from general interestingness. Participants rated fake stories as less accurate than true ones, and were more willing to share stories they saw as more accurate, but fake stories still scored high on interestingness-if-true, which the authors say helps explain why people did not intend to share fake news much less than true news.
Written from the abstract as summarised by Nieman Lab and the Crossref record, 2026-10-31.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
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