On the 26th of January, Anna Ressi (WHU Vallendar) presents her work on "Fake News and the Asymmetry between Type I and Type II Errors: Dismissing True Information is More Prevalent than Following False Information" in Q4.245.
Anna will be available for conversations to interested faculty members in the afternoon. Please contact wendelin.schnedler@uni-paderborn.de in this case (or if you want to join lunch before the talk or dinner in the evening).
Here is the abstract:
We report results from an online experiment conceptualizing fake news contexts as a sender-receiver game extended by three features: Receivers know the direction in which senders have an incentive to steer them, they differ in prior beliefs, and their willingness to follow messages also depends on political worldview. While our design ensures that following the sender's message maximizes receivers' expected financial payoff, we find that they commit far more type II errors (dismissing true messages) than type I errors (following fake messages). This is most pronounced when the message contradicts the sender's incentive, as the message is then almost always true. Testing three potential explanations – strong priors, misperceptions of lying frequencies, and partisanship – we find that none fully accounts for this asymmetry. Moreover, neither encouraging receivers to reflect on senders' incentives nor providing information about actual lying frequencies improves behavior. Overall, our results are consistent with conservatism bias, reinforced by partisanship. We conclude that an important collateral consequence of fake news is the frequent disregard of truthful messages.
