July 2024
·
12 Reads
Computers in Human Behavior
This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.
July 2024
·
12 Reads
Computers in Human Behavior
April 2024
·
56 Reads
Journal of Media Psychology Theories Methods and Applications
Research demonstrates that people outsource memory work to digital devices and to the web, which consequently engenders elevated self-assessments, such as enhanced cognitive self-esteem (CSE). Yet, the reasons for this phenomenon are not well-known. In this domain, two studies explored the role of feeling-of-knowing (FoK) – one’s judgment about whether currently nonrecallable information is actually known – on enhanced CSE. Findings show that people believe that their ability to find needed information is better after performing a web search for answers, as a function of elevated FoK that occurs in the process, and that experiencing greater FoK is related to greater perceived memory ability, better anticipated future performance, and easier perceived question difficulty. Evidence of this metacognitive effect is particularly intriguing since it is also highly paradoxical: under precisely the circumstances when people should recognize their cognitive shortcomings, they assess them to be especially strong.
December 2023
·
99 Reads
·
2 Citations
Sharing positive messages on social media can produce positive outcomes for message senders due to self-effects—the effect of sending messages on message senders themselves. In this domain, one question is whether the performative display of positivity can engender positivity. By examining the sharing of personal experiences in a positive manner on social media, several boundary conditions to self-effects were found: displaying positivity is beneficial to message senders only if message senders have higher (vs. lower) self-esteem or if they experience less (vs. more) toxicity—defined as the suppression of the negative aspects of one’s perceived reality due to engagement with or sending a positive message. Otherwise, displaying positivity can dampen enjoyment or make message senders reluctant to commit to their public self-presentations. However, after people receive feedback from friends, perceived social approval is a better predictor of enjoyment and commitment than displaying positivity.
August 2022
·
111 Reads
·
3 Citations
Western Journal of Communication
Two studies investigated the effects of exposure to disinformation on citizens’ evaluation of politicians and the impact of corrections. Study 1 tested the roles of message valence and relational closeness of social media connections sharing disinformation. Study 2 examined whether corrections on social networking sites could mitigate the influence of disinformation. Results of the first study indicate a limited persuasive effect of disinformation, with negative disinformation being more entertaining but potentially less credible than positive disinformation. Effects of corrections in Study 2 were strong. There was no consistent influence of whether disinformation was shared by a close versus distant friend.
June 2022
·
63 Reads
·
7 Citations
Media Psychology
Online information repositories increasingly serve as memory aids in people’s lives. Access to such information stores, however, can result in false perceived equivalencies between web-based information and personal knowledge, which can in turn influence judgments of oneself, of information search tasks, and of the Internet itself. Cognitive processing fluency, access to reliable web-based information, and actively searching for information are shown in a series of experiments to be associated with judgments related to metacognition and task performance. In the context of online information repositories accessed via web search activities, people are shown to (a) overemphasize the degree to which they find the web to be a ready source of relevant information, (b) overestimate their future task performance and the ease of tasks, and (c) inflate their own perceived cognitive and memory abilities. Results also show that those who are least competent in task completion overestimate their relative performance, whereas the most competent underestimate theirs, and that the availability of web-based information can inflate people’s estimated performance, particularly among the more competent. Collectively, three interrelated studies add considerable new insight regarding the impacts of near-ubiquitous access to contemporary information-saturated environments.
September 2021
·
30 Reads
·
1 Citation
In spite of the capacity for the Internet to connect people and information irrespective of geography, physical location may paradoxically provide influential indicators of the perceived expertise of strangers and the credibility of the information they provide that may in turn guide people’s behaviors. To address this, this study examined the novel concept of geospatial concordance or the degree to which entities implicated in the sharing of aggregated opinions in online information pools are physically close to each other in geographic space. Predictions were tested in the context of user-generated online reviews using stimuli reflecting various types of geospatial concordance: between information consumers and online reviewers, between reviewed venues and their reviewers, and between consumers and reviewed venues. Findings support geographic perspectives emphasizing space as a mental construction imbued with particular meaning and confirm psychological views that people mentally construe places at different levels of abstraction, depending on their psychological, and physical, distance from them.
February 2021
·
1,293 Reads
·
61 Citations
Media and Communication
Research typically presumes that people believe misinformation and propagate it through their social networks. Yet, a wide range of motivations for sharing misinformation might impact its spread, as well as people’s belief of it. By examining research on motivations for sharing news information generally, and misinformation specifically, we derive a range of motivations that broaden current understandings of the sharing of misinformation to include factors that may to some extent mitigate the presumed dangers of misinformation for society. To illustrate the utility of our viewpoint we report data from a preliminary study of people’s dis/belief reactions to misinformation shared on social media using natural language processing. Analyses of over 2,5 million comments demonstrate that misinformation on social media is often disbelieved. These insights are leveraged to propose directions for future research that incorporate a more inclusive understanding of the various motivations and strategies for sharing misinformation socially in large-scale online networks.
December 2020
·
1,042 Reads
·
83 Citations
Social media platforms rarely provide data to misinformation researchers. This is problematic as platforms play a major role in the diffusion and amplification of mis- and disinformation narratives. Scientists are often left working with partial or biased data and must rush to archive relevant data as soon as it appears on the platforms, before it is suddenly and permanently removed by deplatforming operations. Alternatively, scientists have conducted off-platform laboratory research that approximates social media use. While this can provide useful insights, this approach can have severely limited external validity (though see Munger, 2017; Pennycook et al. 2020). For researchers in the field of misinformation, emphasizing the necessity of establishing better collaborations with social media platforms has become routine. In-lab studies and off-platform investigations can only take us so far. Increased data access would enable researchers to perform studies on a broader scale, allow for improved characterization of misinformation in real-world contexts, and facilitate the testing of interventions to prevent the spread of misinformation. The current paper highlights 15 opinions from researchers detailing these possibilities and describes research that could hypothetically be conducted if social media data were more readily available. As scientists, our findings are only as good as the dataset at our disposal, and with the current misinformation crisis, it is urgent that we have access to real-world data where misinformation is wreaking the most havoc.
September 2020
·
269 Reads
·
2 Citations
Source credibility is an ancient topic that has been the focus of renewed and sustained research in the last three‐quarters of a century. Although originally situated in the context of persuasion and conceived as the believability of a source, research has revealed source credibility to be a multidimensional concept consisting of many factors, the most enduring of which include a source's expertise and trustworthiness. Decades of research have shown that higher credibility perceptions predict greater persuasion and attitude change. Research on source credibility has also shown that in addition to source, characteristics of the message, medium, and information receiver impact information evaluation, as well as attitude and behavior change. The Internet and social media have presented new challenges to identifying sources and evaluating them effectively. Information‐processing theories have been invoked to understand the ways in which people evaluate contemporary information sources and research has shown that people use both analytical and heuristic evaluation strategies.
May 2020
·
2 Reads
·
18 Citations
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
The proliferation of online misinformation has been raising increasing societal concerns about its potential consequences, e.g., polarizing the public and eroding trust in institutions. These consequences are framed under the public's susceptibility to such misinformation — a narrative that needs further investigation and quantification. To this end, our paper proposes an observational approach to model and measure expressed (dis)beliefs in (mis)information by leveraging social media comments as a proxy. We collect a sample of tweets in response to (mis)information and annotate them with (dis)belief labels, explore the dataset using lexicon-based methods, and finally build classifiers based on the state-of-the-art neural transfer-learning models (BERT, XLNet, and RoBERTa). Under a domain-specific thresholding strategy for unbiasedness, the best-performing classifier archives macro-F1 scores around 0.86 for disbelief and 0.80 for belief. Applying the classifier, we conduct a large-scale measurement study and show that, for true/mixed/false claims on social media, 12%/14%/15% of comments express disbelief and 26%/21%/20% of comments express belief. In addition, our results suggest an extremely slight time effect of falsehood awareness, a positive effect of fact-checks to false claims, and differences in (dis)belief across social media platforms.
... additionally, social media plays a crucial role in politics, shaping public opinion, mobilising supporters, and facilitating political campaigns (Penney, 2017;Petrova et al., 2021;Zarouali et al., 2022). there have been several studies examining elections, public opinion, and political movement (Bronstein et al., 2018;Flanagin & Metzger, 2017;gil de Zuniga et al., 2018). campaigns can mobilise, communicate, and message through social media platforms. ...
September 2014
... Hidir et al. (2023) argue that people use their own language forms and styles when sending messages, but they generally adapt to an international medium of communication. Lew and Flanagin (2023) further unfold that sending messages is very popular in social media because it is a cost-effective method of communication that transcends borders. The social media platform provides a desirable and positive forum for language learners allowing them to improve their knowledge in a more stress-free environment. ...
December 2023
... Azizah [22] further supports the effectiveness of BFSC-based models, particularly ALBFSC, in detecting fake news, with a focus on the Indonesian context. Despite these advancements, Jiang [23] highlights the challenges in measuring expressed (dis)belief in misinformation, suggesting that the analysis of topic distribution within the true information class may reveal insights into how the BFSC model can be misled into classifying genuine information as false. In this study, after identifying false information through the BFSC model, we conducted a LDA analysis on the contents that were incorrectly identified as false information by the BFSC model. ...
May 2020
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
... In this context, the use of mobile instant messaging applications has been frequent, especially in the Global South. The use of these platforms has promoted the circulation of fake news about Coronavirus (Schaewitz et al., 2022;Ricard and Medeiros, 2020). Thus, in Brazil (35%), Indonesia (33%), and India (28%), users recognize that WhatsApp is the platform through which they receive the most misinformation, while in countries such as the United States (26%) or the United Kingdom (35%) citizens acknowledge having received more hoaxes through Facebook (Newman et al., 2021). ...
August 2022
Western Journal of Communication
... Paradoxically, humans are not modest about this but tend to overestimate their level of knowledge. The overestimation of one's knowledge abilities has already been demonstrated (Eliseev & Marsh, 2023;Fisher et al., 2015Fisher et al., , 2022Sanchez & Dunning, 2018;Ward, 2021), especially in the usage of online information repositories (Flanagin & Lew, 2023). Our memorization behavior regarding digitally available content therefore seems to be particularly Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
June 2022
Media Psychology
... The research demonstrates that people distribute fake information on social media automatically and reactively rather than intentionally. Occasionally, false information is spread deliberately to inform, enlighten and warn others [59]. ...
February 2021
Media and Communication
... Yet, as noted by Guess et al. (2020) in their review of engagement with low credibility websites during the 2016 U.S. election, fewer than 3% of those exposed to an article later determined to contain misinformation also read the corresponding fact-check. Thus far, the challenges posed by practical barriers have yet to be analyzed in full due to limitations with data access (Bruns, 2021;Pasquetto et al., 2020;Venkatagiri et al., 2023). This gap has required researchers and practitioners to rely on assumptions built on experimental data collected in the absence of observable evidence from active political fact-checking campaigns. ...
December 2020
... Sourcing can be broadly defined as "attending to, evaluating, and using available or accessible information about the sources of documents, such as who authored them and what kind of documents they are" (Bråten et al., 2017, p. 141). Source trustworthiness evaluation entails the assessment of the believability of the source, that is, whether the source can be depended on to provide accurate information (Bromme et al., 2018;Flanagin & Metzger, 2020;Hendriks et al., 2016). We conceptualize sources broadly as the origins of the information and the circumstances of its production and communication (Bromme et al., 2018). ...
September 2020
... Unpacking users' perceptions of platforms has revealed the mechanisms through which technology mediates behavior; thus, for example, it is self-evident that by ensuring anonymity, platforms may encourage certain behaviors over others. Such approach contributes to the theoretical understanding of technological mediation (for review see Flanagin, 2020), and more specifically, allows us to refine what is known as the object-centered approach, which "tends to focus on the technology as a whole, emphasizing its uniqueness or newness in time" (Flanagin, 2020: 24), and allow for better theoretical undersetting of technological mediation (for review see Flanagin, 2020). This course of inquiry has put into relief the characteristics of the digital environment in which users feel comfortable interacting with news. ...
March 2020
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
... Some previous studies have generally confirmed the significance of geographical distance on consumers' behaviors and retail revenues (Banerjee et al., 2021;Todri et al., 2021). For example, scholars have found that geographical concordance between the reviewer and the consumer can increase the consumer's behavioral intent to follow the reviewer's recommendation (Banerjee et al., 2021;Bradner & Mark, 2002;Flanagin et al., 2021). However, instead of considering the geographical distance between online consumers, we consider whether geographical location, the review position type (e.g., with a "from Guangzhou city" icon adjacent to a review), affects consumers' purchase intentions. ...
September 2021