Social proof has well-documented consequences in terms of the products we buy, which is why brands care so much about reviews, likes, and retweets. Research from UC Berkeley highlights, however, how this can also help to speed the spread of conspiracy theories.
The researchers highlight how easily we can adopt false beliefs when those beliefs appear to be popular. This can then result in us further spreading such misinformation and helping it to go viral.
“Our study shows that people are more likely to adopt pseudoscientific and misinformed beliefs when they believe them to be more popular,” the authors explain. “These results have important implications for how highlighting social information with ‘likes’ is more likely to spread fake news.”
Human vulnerability
The researchers conducted a couple of experiments to try and understand how vulnerable our mind is in the social media age. The experiments presented volunteers with a range of statements that were either true or false, including that vaccines cause autism, that Hilary Clinton headed up a child sex trafficking ring, and that humans cause climate change.
The results show that people were more likely to either agree or disagree with any particular statement if that statement appeared to be more popular than they expected it to be. Indeed, some of the volunteers changed their mind entirely based on the number of endorsements the statement appeared to receive.
“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,” the researchers explain. “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.”
The algorithms of the social media platforms further exacerbate matters as they tend to amplify content that is receiving a lot of activity in terms of likes and comments.
“What we found is that for almost every single item we tested — all of which are misinformed beliefs — people shifted their beliefs based on the social data alone,” the researchers say. “In other words, if we show someone that a belief is more common than they thought, that makes them see it as more plausible, even if they haven’t seen any direct evidence.”
With previous evidence showing that it’s incredibly hard to change people’s minds once they’re reasonably certain about something, the onus thus falls on the social media platforms themselves to curb the spread of misinformation. For instance, they could remove the social engagement metrics from content that has been identified as misleading.
