People Prefer the Truth on Social Media |
Research explored people's ability to distinguish true from untrue social media statements.
They were pretty good at making this distinction, even when the statements were written with an LLM.
People found true statements more persuasive than untrue statements.
This finding held even when the statements were designed to be attention-grabbing.
There is a lot of concern about the impact of social media on the kind of information that people encounter that shapes their beliefs about the world. Misinformation about science and politics can influence voting behavior, support for research, and people’s health-related actions. Because of the importance of this topic, it should not be surprising that this issue has become the target of psychology research.
An interesting paper by Nicholas Fay, Keith Ransom, Bradley Walker, Piers Howe, Andrew Perfors, and Yoshihisa Kashima in a 2026 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explores whether people find messages that are true more persuasive than messages that are false.
The researchers did four studies that were focused on differences in reactions people have to true and false information. The first two studies focused on persuasion. In one study, they started by having a group of people generate social media messages designed to be persuasive about a set of topics. Some participants were asked to generate only messages they believed to be true. Others were asked to generate messages they........