Group effects of information evaluation in social media
Humans are inherently social creatures; we evolved to live in groups and our brains have developed to thrive in social environments. In information sharing we use complex communication to share important information to foster development, innovation and wellbeing in our group. Although reliable and verified information should be preferred, we sometimes share information that we do not completely trust but which are novel, important or interesting. Social and neurocognitive mechanisms such as the need to belong are powerful target points, which could be triggered to propagate information, true or false. Particularly, social media exploits these mechanisms as they directly offer tools for social interaction such sharing and liking messages. Although such features seem to mimic social behaviour in real life and may activate brain areas of reward, mentalising, or self-referential cognition, open questions remain in how news is perceived and shared in different social contexts. The goal of this project is to reveal the neural mechanisms underlying the interactive process of news evaluation and sharing them in a group. The innovation in this project is 1) to combine the research fields of neuroscience, psychology, media, computer and learning sciences to study social interactions regarding news sharing, 2) applying the concept of group awareness to the case of news evaluation and test the use of group awareness tools and 3) benefitting from researcher’s strong expertise in multivariate brain imaging data analysis for studying the neural mechanisms of information sharing in groups. Specifically, the project focuses on four research questions: 1) which factors contribute to evaluating and sharing news 2) what are the influences and dynamics of being part of a group for news evaluation and sharing 3) what are the neurocognitive correlates of news sharing and the social influence of feedback from the group 4) which measures could be taken by the group to prevent false information from spreading.. The project is comprised of five research studies combining behavioural investigations and brain imaging to examine the neurocognitive processes of fake news evaluation. Taken together, the project has shown the importance of emotions when evaluating news, false or true. Not only is emotional news perceived differently than neutral news, taking the activations in the brain into account, the tremendous impact of emotions in news texts could be shown. Further, the research project could show that the context as e.g. an embedding narrative, have an influence on the news credibility evaluation. Consequently, instructing learning processes regarding news evaluation as well as research for the underlying mechanisms should not be limited solely to cognitive processes but should also include social and affective neurocognitive aspects. Furthermore, narratives and perspective taking, as one element of storytelling, are an additional aspect relevant for news evaluation, that students learning to evaluate news should be aware of.
