The intuitive explanation is straightforward: people believe fake stories because they lack knowledge or education. The “science literacy model,” which dominated efforts to counter disinformation for decades, holds that the solution is to educate people, present evidence, and correct errors. However, more recent research shows that this model is incorrect — or, at the very least, seriously incomplete.
In 2017, Dan Kahan of Yale University examined what is known as identity-protective cognition and identified a paradox: intelligent, well-educated individuals do not become more objective on contentious political issues. On the contrary, they defend their group’s position even more firmly. They deploy their cognitive abilities not to seek the truth, but to justify what they already believe.
Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand (2019, Cognition) reached a somewhat different conclusion: susceptibility to fake news is better explained not by motivated reasoning, but by insufficient cognitive effort. In other words, people believe fake news not because they interpret it through the lens of their prior beliefs (identity-protective cognition), but because they fail to evaluate it critically. …
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These two conclusions do not contradict each other. Rather, they describe different conditions. When a belief has not yet become part of one’s identity, it may be sufficient to pause and reflect. However, once it has, even an intelligent person may deploy their full cognitive capacity to defend a false belief.
