Americans Were Primed To Believe The Current Onslaught Of Disinformation

 

 

 

"Priming is where an external source, a sender of information, is trying to prime people to think a certain way,” said Mark Whitmore, a professor of management and information systems at Kent State University who has studied misinformation and cognitive bias. “One of the ways in which priming occurs is through partisanship. When that happens, people have a greater tendency to think along the lines of whatever party they feel they belong to.”

When people are already primed to think about a topic in a certain way, it can lead them to seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs.

There’s also the illusory truth effect: a phenomenon in which the more times people are exposed to an idea, the more likely they are to perceive it as true, regardless of political leanings

That said, this is probably not the only thing influencing so many people to seek out disinformation around the election, according to Pennycook.

“I don’t think you need to know about illusory truth to be able to explain that the things Trump has said made people ready to accept that fraud was going to happen in the election,” Pennycook said. “Illusory truth is one aspect of that, but for some people, if they only heard Trump say it once, that would probably be enough.”

read article by Kaleigh Rogers​

Americans Were Primed To Believe The Current Onslaught Of Disinformation | FiveThirtyEight