Hi everybody, I'm Catenya McHenry at the McCombs School of Business
and thank you for joining us today on our Big Ideas Show,
where we take a deeper look at faculty research happening here
in our School of Business.
Joining me today is a familiar face, Tricia Moravec,
she is assistant professor in our IROM department,
which is Information Risk Operations Management.
Good to see you Tricia, thank you for joining us today.
- So good to see you!
- Yay! I get so excited every time I see somebody's face.
- I know, I know. - (laughs)
- I'm like, "I miss you!" - And this is such a fun thing to
be talking about and to be online for. - I know, I know.
Well Tricia is joining us today to talk about her new piece of
co-authored research that ties in with her first piece of research
which you may remember was focused on fake news and really had to do with
the 2016 election that focused on fake news on Facebook,
and it was in regards to actual fake articles.
So her paper -- her new paper is titled,
"Appealing to Sense and Sensibility: System 1 and System 2 Interventions
for Fake News on Social Media."
So for first, let's just recap what your first piece of research focused
a little bit more on, Tricia.
- Okay, so that piece of research, that was -- oh, I don't know,
we talked about that about nine months ago I guess,
and that research was looking at whether students could detect misinformation
on social media, and whether this misinformation flag that Facebook
had debuted worked as they had intended it to.
And essentially what we found was that people were very --
not good at detecting misinformation.
The flag that Facebook had debuted did not work to reduce people's belief
in headlines that it was included on.
We had EEG, or electroencephalography included in that research,
which showed us that, although the flag didn't work as intended,
people did think more about headlines that were aligned with their beliefs
and flagged, which suggested that although the flag that they had been using
at that time was not effective in reducing beliefs, people thought more.
That led us to the question of "Well, was it just that the flag was designed poorly?
"Is it that a better-designed flag, one based on theory, would be more effective
"in helping people actually detect misinformation?"
Especially in this really important case where it aligns with your beliefs,
where your confirmation bias would want you to believe it.
- Right. - So that's what really prompted this
paper that we're going to talk about today.
- And so your follow up paper, you guys took two different approaches to
implementing a fake news flag.
So, talk a little bit about this new piece as a follow up and what you guys
really studied and what the outcome was.
- So, with this one, we were drawing on some of the theory
that we used in the first paper, which was that people--
typically the way we process information is one of two ways:
we either process it with a gut level reaction or we process it with a more
intentional reaction.
This is called type one, type two, system one, system two processing by Kahneman.
What we were thinking here is that generally when people are on social media,
they are more likely to be in a hedonic mindset, which means
they're passively pursuing entertainment, not really actively pursuing anything,
it's passive.
So, given that they're in this hedonic mindset, it may be more likely that
as they're processing information, they continue to stay in this system one
gut level response, which is your first response to anything that you
see in the world around you.
It's this system one, your gut level intuitive automatic response, but if
you're searching for entertainment and you're on social media and you're like,
passively even looking for entertainment, are you really going to be motivated
to think critically and move toward this system two reaction?
So, based on this theorizing, we said, "Well, what if we made a flag that is
intended to be processed most effectively with your gut level response?"
Then we made a flag that was most effectively processed when you thought
critically about it with your system two, and then if we added those two components
together to create this combination flag that would be very effective because
first you're going to respond to it with your system one gut level reaction
and it's going to have some there, but then as you continue to look
at the flag, if you actually are prompted into this system two critical style
thinking it's going to be even more effective.
That's what we were trying to do was, create the flag based on theory and see
if it's more effective but then also test whether by creating this very small
awareness training by telling people what the flag was intended to do,
how that actually increases the effectiveness of the flag
in helping people to disbelieve misinformation.
- Did it make a difference which platform you guys used the flag on
or was there one particular platform that you used specifically?
- We really looked at the Facebook platform for this because Facebook has
over two billion active users in the world, so there's so many more users.
For this, we just focused on Facebook, but you could likely generalize partially
to other platforms depending on how likely people are to think critically.
- So, when it comes to the flag, did it depend on what the flag looked like
or the particular pieces of news that the flag was on,
did that make any difference?
- It does! - any way or the other
with somebody's reaction to it?
- Yeah, so it always makes a difference what type of headline the flag is on
because what we see across the board is that people are more likely to believe,
or they show higher belief, in headlines that align with their
(inaudible) beliefs or align with their confirmation bias.
- Which is what you guys did in the first paper, right?
- Yes, that's something we always control for.
That's not a main part of our study, but it's a control.
We want to make sure that we are accommodating for the fact that
people are more likely to believe some information than others.
What we saw was that, even with our confirmation bias,
the combination flag was highly effective,
and even when people weren't trained on the combination flag
even when they weren't made aware of the flag before they saw it,
it was more effective at reducing belief than the other non-combination flag,
even when people were trained on what they were.
So when we combine the system one aspect of the flag
with the system two which, again, people may not be processing it
in exactly the ways that were intended but it's most effective if they do.
So this combination flag was just so strong in reducing people's belief
in headlines that it actually was one of these cases where
it's influence was far beyond that of confirmation bias.
- Mhm.
- Which is sometimes hard to do, to kind of counteract confirmation bias.
But here, we were able to see that this combination flag
was quite good at counteracting people's confirmation bias.
- Right. So how is this relevant to today?
In the last nine months since your first piece of research,
several of the platforms have made changes to the back end of
how they categorize information, how they present information,
how information is shared.
So how is the research relevant to today?
And leading up to another election, how important is the research as well?
- So I think it continues to be really important, right?
With COVID-19 and all of the health misinformation that we've seen,
I continue to wonder how we could have responded better
to this global pandemic had we had something like these misinformation flags
applied to videos and articles that were clearly misinformation.
- Sure. - And especially when
some of the health information that was being shared
could potentially be deadly. - Right.
- And in these cases, it's very clear to me that these misinformation flags
could be very, very useful. - Yeah.
- And likely very effective in producing better outcomes
for us individually but also for our country together.
- Sure. - And, as we've seen,
Twitter has tried to start taking some stand against misinformation
and I love seeing that. - Yeah.
- And I think that they could have a better designed flag,
but as someone who's researching misinformation
and who really just wants us to do everything we can
to combat misinformation, I love that they're making an effort.
- Sure. - I think they can have a better flag.
I think that using a flag like the one that we studied in this paper
would likely be more effective, but I cannot fault them for
at least taking action. - Yeah.
- Whereas with Facebook, it's a lot harder to see
that they are taking action against misinformation.
- Sure. - And I think they can
continue to do better to counter misinformation on the platform.
- Yeah, just recently on Twitter, you may have seen,
they suspended Donald Trump Jr.'s account because of an article--
I think a video maybe that he-- - It was a video on hydroxychloroquine,
- Mhm. - And it was
full of misinformation and I think that by taking these videos down,
which is what they did, and then suspending the account for
only certain activities for 12 hours, that's not a huge deal.
That's not a super long amount of time. - Mhm.
- I think that this hopefully is something that will encourage
these people who are sharing misinformation
to more critically consider the content that they're sharing.
- Sure. - And the problem with this is that
this health misinformation, this pandemic should not be political.
- Right. - It's a health crisis.
And there shouldn't really be politics involved and so
I think that them taking a stand and removing these videos,
this is really great. This is positive.
It's unfortunate to see the responses that suggest that it is political in nature.
- Right. - When, you know--
When we're looking at this crisis, like this crisis is--
it should not be political. - Right.
- It is a health crisis. Misinformation is causing more problems
for the United States - Sure.
- And any way that we can counter that misinformation is positive.
And hopefully, you can get to a point where that's not a political issue
but I don't have a ton of hope for that.
- Well, it seems like your research is, obviously it's relevant,
but it also seems like it could be never-ending
because of how we're progressing - (laughs)
- And what we're in the midst of. So what do you think is important
for you to research next, now that you know what you know
just from these two papers?
- I mean I have so much more research in progress right now.
And I think, as you said, it's just--
this problem isn't ending anytime soon, as far as we can see, which it could.
Right? There's a way that this could end, - Sure.
And my research stream would kind of fizzle out.
And I honestly wouldn't be mad becaues that would be good
for all of us right? - Right.
- But since that's not happening, there's all of these questions about
how does misinformation continue to spread
that some people are studying which is great.
I'm continuing to look at different ways that we can share information
on social media to help people make more responsible decisions
about the information they're consuming rather than just
believing something that aligns with their confirmation bias
without critically considering it. So constantly looking at these
different types of interventions. Not all for misinformation.
Some for political bias. - Right.
- How can we help people consume more neutral news
so that we can actually bring people back together instead of this
political divide that we're continuing to see.
- Yeah. - And then--
Because tried to continue with my EEG research
but that proved to be very difficult during a global pandemic
when this type of research is unfortunately on hold.
So, that is unfortunate.
- Well thank you so much for joining us today Tricia
it's good to see you again. If you'd like to read more
about Tricia's research with her other two co-authors,
we will have a link in the description but the paper is titled,
"Appealing to Sense and Sensibility: System 1 and System 2 Interventions
"for Fake News on Social Media."
Again thank you for joining us today, and thank you for joining us,
our audience on our Big Ideas show. We will see you next time.