Perceptions of Other People’s Ability to Detect Misinformation

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Nicoleta Corbu, who explores the same dataset as the previous two speakers by examining third-person perceptions about misinformation detection. People generally tend to perceive greater media effects on third persons than on themselves; this might also have consequences for their own behaviours, such as less active fact-checking practices – but to date, there is no empirical data to prove this assumption.

The present study used the survey data also used by the past two speakers to establish participants’ third-person perceptions and explore their own engagement in active or passive fact-checking. It shows that the third-person effect is universal across countries, if more or less strong; better news and political knowledge increases perceptions of others being less able to detect misinformation than the participants themselves.

But interestingly such perceptions did not directly and negatively affect people’s fact-checking behaviours; in fact, some who felt they were better ad detecting misinformation than others engaged in more active fact-checking – they are far from complacent, and in fact their perception of less misinformation literacy in others could well stem from their frequent active fact-checking.