Visual Imagery, Anger, and Anxiety as Predictors of Belief, Sharing, and Fact-Checking

The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Cristian Vaccari, who provides a global perspective on visual disinformation. Visual content enjoys a cognitive advantage over text, and is more likely to be treated as realistic; verbal content, too, is more likely to be treated as true if it is accompanied by related images. Most recent social media platforms have a strong audiovisual component, therefore, but equally we have seen a recent rise in visual disinformation.

Images may also elicit emotions more effectively than text, and emotions in turn have implications for how information is processed: anxiety motivates people to seek out further information (from good as well as bad sources), while anger may encourage biased processing of information via ‘hot cognition’ as well as motivate both instrumental and expressive participation (anxiety motivates only expressive participation).

This project then explores whether people are willing to believe (visual) information, to share information, and to fact-check information, and whether and how feelings of anxiety or anger affect such willingness. It tested this across the US, Hong Kong, Israel, Brazil, and Indonesia (with South Africa hopefully to come soon), through a series of large-scale surveys that test for demographics; deploy the research on both desktop and mobile devices; simulate Facebook, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, and non-platform environments; assign engagement with five out of eight issues; assign one of seven possible treatments of these issues (six of these as image plus text, one text-only); and finally measures the participants’ likely willingness to believe, share, and check misinformation. (Phew.).

The direct effects of seeing images on believing, sharing, and checking information are generally quite small. However, seeing an image with text increases anxiety, and this in turn increases the likelihood to believe, share, and check misinformation, so there are more notable indirect effects. This could have positive or negative consequences, depending on whether such anxiety results more in believing or sharing activities, or also in fact-checking. But the role of demographics, and different patterns in different countries, also still need to be explored further.