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, 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, we 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). We 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.