Newswise — Chestnut Hill, Mass. (7/17/2023) –In the current "post-truth era," Boston College psychologists conducted experiments to examine how Americans determine the truthfulness of factual claims. The team's recent report in Nature's Scientific Reports revealed that people take into account the intentions of the information source when deciding whether a claim should be considered true or false.
The confidence in assessing a claim's accuracy is influenced by what individuals believe the source intends to achieve – whether it is to inform the audience or to deceive them. Even when individuals have access to precise information about a claim's accuracy, their judgment of its truthfulness is significantly swayed by the perceived intentions of the information source.
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Liane Young, who is one of the report's authors, explained that people's beliefs about the truth or falsehood of a claim are heavily dependent on the intentions they attribute to the source of that claim. In essence, the intentions of information sources play a crucial role in shaping people's judgments about what should be considered true.
Lead author Isaac Handley-Miner, a PhD student and researcher in Young's Morality Lab, highlighted that the so-called post-truth era has resulted in significant disagreements regarding the truthfulness of factual claims, even those that are easily verifiable.
Handley-Miner expressed concern about the alarming disagreement prevailing in society. The traditional assumption that the labels "true" and "false" solely correspond to the objective accuracy of a claim has been called into question. The researchers wondered whether people also consider other factors, such as the intentions of the information source, when determining the truthfulness of a claim, even when the objective accuracy is known.
To investigate this, the researchers conducted experiments involving participants who were shown a series of claims along with the corresponding ground truth. In one experiment, the claims focused on politicized topics like climate change, abortion, and gun violence, while in another, they covered non-politicized subjects such as car lifespan and headphone prices. The participants were then asked to assess whether each claim should be considered true or false.
Each participant was presented with one of two scenarios regarding the source of the information they were evaluating. The researchers achieved this by replacing the news outlet that allegedly published the claim. For instance, one participant might be informed that a claim about climate change came from Fox News, while another participant might be told that the same claim came from MSNBC, thus manipulating the perceived intentions of the information source.
In the experiment involving claims about non-politicized topics, the researchers explicitly informed the participants about the intentions of the information source – whether it aimed to provide accurate information or deceive the audience, as Handley-Miner explained.
The participants were presented with various claims of fact, and they were well-informed about the accuracy or inaccuracy of each claim. The researchers manipulated the information source's intentions, presenting some participants with claims from sources intending to inform and others with sources intending to deceive. The participants were then asked to determine the truthfulness of the claims based on the provided ground truth. The researchers collected and analyzed around 16,200 responses from a total of 1,181 participants.
Surprisingly, even when participants had precise knowledge about the accuracy of the claims, they tended to label the claims as false more frequently when they believed the information source had deceptive intentions. This suggests that the perceived intentions of the source strongly influenced their judgment of truthfulness.
Similarly, the study revealed that participants were more inclined to classify claims as true when they believed the information source intended to provide an approximate account rather than an exact one. For instance, if there were confirmed reports that 114 people attended an event, but one source stated 109 attendees while another claimed 100 attendees, individuals were likely to consider the latter number as true because they assumed it was an estimation, according to Young.
These findings indicate that people's judgments of truth are not solely influenced by the objective accuracy of the claims. Instead, even when individuals have access to the same set of facts, they may disagree about the truthfulness of claims if they attribute different intentions to the information sources.
While this study focused on the impact of information source intent, Young and Handley-Miner acknowledge that there could be other factors people consider when evaluating truth.
Looking ahead, the researchers plan to further explore how people conceptualize truth in a broader sense. Additionally, with the increasing popularity of Artificial Intelligence models like ChatGPT, they may investigate whether such advanced AI systems exhibit similar thought processes in evaluating truth compared to humans, or if they merely rely on objective accuracy.
The research received support from the John Templeton Foundation, the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and BC's Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society's Grants for Exploratory Collaborative Scholarship (SIGECS) program.
In addition to Young and Handley-Miner, co-authors of the report included doctoral candidate Michael Pope, Boston College Associate Professor of Philosophy Richard Atkins, Associate Professor of Communication Mo Jones-Jang, and Associate Professor of Philosophy Daniel McKaughan; and Dartmouth College’s Jonathan Phillips.
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