Fabio Torreggiani (Università degli Studi di Milano – NASP)

“Social Mechanisms of Misinformation Perception. A Survey Experiment on the Role of Social Norms and Anti-Elitism”

Abstract. Despite being an ever-existing issue of communication, misinformation recently gained wide attention for its possible negative consequences on modern democracies. Past research trying to understand why people believe fake news rarely went outside the boundaries of cognitive and political explanations. On the other hand, this project aims at exploring the role of two social mechanisms, i.e. social norms and anti-elitism. With the use of an online survey experiment where participants will evaluate a list of news, this paper firstly aims at finding correlational evidence of a link between anti-elitism and misinformation beliefs. Secondly, participants will be asked about their normative and empirical expectations regarding the importance of accurately reading and sharing news. Thirdly, a treatment in the form of a priming message will be used to assess if these social norms can be changed and with what results. Finally, with the objective of connecting stated beliefs with observed behaviours, participants will have the possibility to provide their Twitter username in exchange for an additional economic compensation.