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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

A new study finds that people are prone to changing their beliefs based on what others think, even if they’re false [berkeley.edu]:

As social creatures, we humans care what others think and are influenced by the number of likes, hearts and retweets on social media posts. The downside? An attraction to popular beliefs — whether they’re true or false — can speed up the spread of conspiracy theories, suggests new UC Berkeley research.

“Our study shows that people are more likely to adopt pseudoscientific and misinformed beliefs when they believe them to be more popular,” said study lead author Evan Orticio, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Berkeley. “These results have important implications for how highlighting social information with ‘likes’ is more likely to spread fake news.”

[...] Overall, they found that study participants were more likely to agree or disagree with a statement after seeing evidence that the belief was more popular than they had expected it to be. Some who were on the fence about a controversial issue changed their minds based solely on the number of endorsements the statement received.

“It makes sense for us to care about what other people think, not just to conform, but because we’re looking for reliable sources of information,” Orticio said. “But research suggests that fake news tends to travel, by some estimates, six times faster than fact-based news on Twitter and other social media platforms.”

“That’s because the algorithms social media platforms use to promote whatever is most engaging or attention grabbing are often at odds with what is actually true in the world, especially if one is prone to burrow into echo chambers where everyone agrees with you,” he added. “When misinformation gets a lot of likes or retweets, it can give people a very distorted impression of how common that belief actually is — which we now know can affect how believable they find it themselves.”

Journal Reference:
Evan Orticio, Louis Martí, and Celeste Kidd, Social Prevalence Is Rationally Integrated in Belief Updating [open]. Open Mind 2022; DOI: 10.1162/opmi_a_00056 [doi.org]

Original Submission