Receiving vs. believing (mis)information from friends: experimental evidence from India

Jimmy Narang

No h7pue, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Do people believe a news story more if it is shared by a friend? Should they? I investigate this using experiments in India with 800 pairs of friends and a custom social-media platform. I find sharers can distinguish true from false stories but share both equally, making sharing uninformative about a story's truth. Receivers, however, interpret sharing as a sign of truth: they overestimate how well sharers’ beliefs predict veracity; discount how factors besides belief influence sharing decisions; and update the most on stories they least believed initially. Altogether, stories gain (unmerited) credibility from being shared by a friend

Date: 2024-07-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:h7pue

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/h7pue

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