Receiving vs. believing (mis)information from friends

Experimental evidence from India.

How much do people (additionally) believe a news story because it’s been shared by a friend? How much should they believe it for that reason? To answer these questions we conduct a series of lab experiments in India with ~800 pairs of real-life friends. Using a custom platform, we collect detailed information on how individuals (sharers) decide which stories to share, and how their friends (receivers) update their beliefs in response. We find receivers over-interpret sharing as a sign of a story’s veracity and the sharer’s faith in it, while discounting other reasons/motivations for sharing. As a result, receivers’ trust in shared stories increases irrespective of the sharers’ belief in them, with false stories accruing the greatest additional trust. To identify mechanisms, I measure how receivers update if, instead of observing their friend’s decisions they (i) learn their friend’s beliefs, and (ii) receive computer-generated clues of known accuracy (instead of subjective signals from their friend). I find several mechanisms contribute to receivers’ biased inference: receivers overestimate how well sharers’ beliefs predict a story’s veracity; miscalculate the relevance of those beliefs to sharing decisions; and exhibit base-rate neglect, updating the most on stories they least believed originally.

Note

Draft Here.