Effects of Associative Inference on Individuals' Susceptibility to Misinformation

Public Significance Statement The present study shows that associative inference, an adaptive cognitive mechanism, can make participants susceptible to misinformation in the recognition judgment. However, participants, especially those of higher cognitive ability, gave lower accuracy ratings for fake news with associative inference than that without associative inference, indicating less susceptibility to the semantic judgment. Associative inference is an adaptive process of memory that allows people to recombine associated information and make novel inferences. We report two online human-subject experiments investigating an associative inference version in which participants viewed overlapping real-news pairs (AB&BC) that could later be linked to support inferences of misinformation (AC). In each experiment, we examined participants' recognition and perceived accuracy of snippets of news articles presented as tweets across two phases. At Phase 1, only real-news tweets were presented, which were associated with political news of Phase 2 at three levels: real, fake, and fake with inference. In Experiment 2, participants' cognitive ability was also assessed. Participants recognized more but gave lower accuracy ratings for the fake news with inference than the fake news in both experiments. The effect of associative inference was more evident in the perceived accuracy ratings for participants of higher cognitive ability than those of lower cognitive ability. We conclude that associative inference can make people become susceptible to misinformation. We also discuss the results in terms of why associative inference made people susceptible to misinformation in the relatively automatic familiarity judgment (i.e., recognition) but not the relatively controlled and effortful semantic judgment (i.e., accuracy rating).