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Social media usage has been increasing day by day in the contemporary world (Clement, 2019). Ever since the emergence of social media, connectedness has increased and people are more in touch with each other. The added advantage of asynchronous means of communication on social media has facilitated individuals to seek and share information effortlessly; however, this has led to several problems. One of these issues is the significant increase in the amount of misinformation in circulation, which can be attributed to the importance of a parallel virtual life. Misinformation has existed in the world for centuries. It may be defined as incomplete, inconsequential, inaccurate, vague information that could arise from unreasonable beliefs. It is important, for the purpose of this paper, to distinguish misinformation from disinformation, which refers to misleading information shared wilfully (Karlova & Lee, 2012).
People’s tendency to believe information conveyed through the virtual world as they do that of the real world has given rise to the problem of increased spread of misinformation. Further, online media is being used for the deliberate and non-deliberate dissemination of such fake messages. Rather than relying on conventional news sources as in the past, laypersons often curate and share social media information as facts without checking its accuracy (Molina, Sundar, Le & Lee, 2019).
The current level of spread of misinformation and inaccurate information being circulated in the media has led the World Health Organization to describe it as an “infodemic,” and the World Economic Forum has announced the misinformation diffusion in social media to be a great threat to the society, which further shows that the spread of misinformation is becoming extensively prevalent. This, in turn, stresses the need for mobilizing strategies against the spread of misinformation. One potential weapon against misinformation is effortful thinking or the need for cognition.
Defined as “the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking,”need for cognition has been described as being the stable individual difference in the proneness to involve in cognitive activities that require effort. Cohen, Stotland, and Wolfe were the first to emphasise the need for cognition; through their studies, they found that individuals with a higher level of need for cognition have an increased level of organization and assessment of information compared to their low-need-for-cognition counterparts (Setiwan, 2017). People with high need for cognition tend to engage in problem-relevant thinking, put in more effort, gain information when trying to solve problems, and show intolerance toward uncertainty and ambiguity (Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein & Jarvis. 1996). Further, it has been found that individuals with a low need for cognition tend to be more influenced by the attractiveness of advertisement endorsers than people with high need for cognition (Haugtvedt, Petty & Cacioppo, 1992). Heuristic–systematic model of information processing, which explains how information is processed in two different modes, suggests that since heuristic processing does not exert much cognitive demands on the individual unlike systematic processing (Chen & Chaiken, 1999), it can be considered a way through which people assume the authenticity and credibility of information, for instance, assuming that “experts know best,” “consensus means correctness,” and so on (Lange, Kruglanski, Higgins, 2012, Chap. 12).