In the run up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, British politician Michael Gove remarked that the British public had “had enough of experts”. With misinformation so rife in recent years you could be forgiven for thinking he was right, but research from Cambridge University suggests that might not be entirely true.
The findings emerged from a survey of over 4,400 people from the US, UK, Russia, and Turkey to understand how people determine whether what they’re reading or watching is misinformation. The results show that experts are given far more credibility than either friends or the mainstream media.
“People tend to treat the general description of misinformation in line with how the scientific community define disinformation, where deliberate attempts to mislead matters,” the researchers say. “People tend to defer to experts and scientific evidence as sources on which to judge a claim as misinformation.”
Spotting misinformation
The research found that people regard something as misinformation when most scientific evidence indicates this is the case. This was especially so if expert groups indicate that something is incorrect. What’s more, people typically regard misinformation that exaggerates conclusions rather than blatantly spreads falsehoods. What is clear, however, is that people do regard it as an intentional rather than unintentional act.
“When people encounter communication that they judge to be misinformation, they naturally try to infer what the intentions are behind it,” the authors explain. “Psychologically this means, in the absence of anything else to go by, people will be devising their own theories as to why misleading information is being communicated to them.”
These findings appeared to be pretty consistent across each of the four countries and were even consistent across factors such as gender, education, and age.
“The pattern of responses was broadly consistent despite differences in background, gender and other factors,” the researchers conclude. “There have been claims that less educated people are more susceptible to misinformation, but our survey instead found that – highly educated or not – people converge on the same sorts of general features of information to determine whether something is or isn’t misinformation.
Of course, the fact that most people access their information through the media rather than from experts directly does underline the challenge experts face in getting their voices heard, especially when many media outlets continue to lean towards sensational and shocking rather than informative content.
Indeed, research from several years ago highlighted the crucial role the media actually plays in spreading misinformation online. It seems clear that the media plays a crucial role in providing experts with a platform to reach the masses, but it’s far from clear whether they’re currently up to that job.
