• Dices alternatively depicting the words "Fact/Fake"; Brain City Berlin

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    12.02.2025

    Fake News: Who falls for it and why?

Today, false reports created with manipulative intent spread rapidly by means of the internet, especially via social media. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development conducted a meta-analysis to examine who is particularly susceptible to fake news that are disseminated online and why. With surprising results.

In its “Global Risks Report 2024,” the World Economic Forum (WEF) lists misinformation and disinformation as the top risk for 2025/2026.  More than 1,400 experts and personalities from business, politics and society who were surveyed fear that fake news, increasingly AI-generated content, will further weaken trust in institutions and drive social and political division worldwide. With dramatic consequences. Despite extensive research, it has been largely unclear who is particularly vulnerable to online misinformation and why. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Development in Berlin have now investigated this in a meta-analysis.

“There is currently a flood of research on misinformation, but the amount of work is making it increasingly difficult to recognise the relationships between different factors,” says lead author Mubashir Sultan, a PhD student in the Adaptive Rationality research area at the MPI for Human Development. Together with his colleagues, he evaluated the raw data from 31 US studies. The researchers looked at demographic factors such as education, age, gender and political identity as well as psychological factors – analytical thinking, partisan bias, motivated reflection and the familiarity of the respondents with news. Sultan: “In contrast to traditional meta-analyses, which only look at effect values from previous studies, this approach allows us to work with individual data from each study, making the analysis much more meaningful.”

The main results of the meta-analysis

  • Education: The level of educational attainment of the participants had no significant influence on the ability to distinguish between true and false information. This contradicts the widespread assumption that higher educated people are less susceptible to misinformation, particularly because higher education promotes critical thinking.
     
  • Age: Older adults are often portrayed as more susceptible to fake news. However, the analysis showed that they were better able to distinguish true from false headlines than younger adults. Paradoxically, however, according to the MPI team, previous research has repeatedly shown that older adults are more likely to engage with misinformation and share it online.
  • Analytical thinking: People with higher analytical thinking skills are better able to distinguish between true and false news than others. For example, they were able to evaluate information more logically and recognize patterns better. Overall, they proved to be more skeptical.
     
  • Partisan bias: Participants were more likely to believe news that matched their political identity and rejected news that did not match their political identity. Individuals with higher analytical thinking skills showed a stronger partisan bias. In this cognitive process, known as “motivated reflection,” analytical thinking works against one’s own judgement in order to protect existing beliefs, values, or political affiliations.
     
  • Familiarity: The influence of familiarity proved to be the strongest effect filtered out in the meta-analysis: If participants stated that they had already seen a news headline, they were more likely to believe it was true. This underscores the danger of repeated exposure to misinformation, especially on social media.

 “Given the rise of right-wing populism, the findings of the study are highly relevant and could influence debates about how best to combat misinformation in different demographic groups,” said Ralf Kurvers, Senior Research Scientist in the Adaptive Rationality research area at the MPI for Human Development and co-author of the study. The results of the meta-analysis therefore provide important findings for theoretical work and the development of intervention strategies.

To help individuals combat misinformation more effectively, a research team in which scientist from the MPI for Human Development were involved, has put together a toolbox. The “Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation” can be downloaded free of charge online. (vdo)

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