Different Perspectives Lead to Deeper Fact-Checking: Study

A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology, conducted by myself and my collaborators Michael Baker and Françoise Détienne, found that individuals demonstrated a greater inclination to fact-check social media posts and were more open to revising their initial beliefs when they were paired with individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds.

If you’re French, you’re less likely than an Englishman to believe a tweet claiming that Great Britain produces more cheese than France. And if you’re English, you’re more likely than a French person to believe the tweet that only 43% of French people shower every day.

More interestingly, when the English and the French checked such Tweets together, how they did so and the extent to which they changed their initial beliefs depended on whether they were “congruent” or “incongruent” with respect to cultural identity.

We found that French-French and English-English pairs focused on confirming the evidence and stuck to their original beliefs, while English-French pairs searched deeper and refined their beliefs according to the evidence.

Why it matters

Social media misinformation is one of the biggest challenges of our time. It contributes to political polarization, influences people’s voting, vaccination and recycling behavior, and is often believed long after it has been fixed.

In recent weeks, misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war has reached unprecedented levels, stoking ethnic, religious and political tensions worldwide — including on American campuses.

To address the challenge of misinformation, researchers need to better understand how people process information online. In addition to advancing this understanding, the findings suggest that bringing opposing people together to fact-check controversial social media posts may improve their media literacy and ability to engage in civic discourse.

Bringing people from opposite sides of the conflict together to fact-check social media posts is unlikely to be easy. At times like these, it’s hard to even get them in the same room to talk directly to each other instead of hurling slogans—and worse—at each other.

Despite the commitment of publicly funded institutions to fostering informed discourse and preparing the nation’s future citizens, my colleagues and I believe they remain the most promising places to try this approach.

What next

In future studies, we plan to focus on topics that are more controversial than cheese or personal hygiene to see if the moderating effect of mismatched pairs still holds.

For example, we could show Israeli-Palestinian couples social media posts about the Oct. 27, 2023, explosion at al-Ahli Hospital—an event so controversial that The New York Times is still struggling to explain its original cause of the blast. An Israeli bomb instead of an Islamic Jihad missile.

Observing how compatible and incompatible couples check such messages would shed light on how the controversial nature of a tweet affects people’s ability to fact-check effectively. Specifically, when the stakes are higher in terms of people’s identities, are incompatible pairs still better than compatible pairs, or does content controversy prevent effective cooperation?

How we do our work

Many studies of misinformation have focused on who believes it and how it spreads. Few studies have investigated the actual processes by which people evaluate what they read online.

Our approach to studying people’s reflection on online information is to create experimental situations where reflection is natural and observable. In this study, we designed a new kind of research setting based on the fact that sharing social media messages and discussing them with others is an everyday activity.