Right-wing authoritarian attitudes, fast-paced decision-making, and the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines

Abstract

Social media played a prominent role in the spread of vaccine-related fake news during the global COVID-19 crisis. Previous work has shown that both trait-related and situational factors influence the spread of fake news on social media. However, we have limited insight into how the specific contextual conditions that shape information processing on social media contribute to the proliferation of misinformation. In this article, we posit that people are more susceptible to spreading misinformation because they engage selectively, briefly, and heuristically with political news on social media. To test our argument, we rely on a pre-registered online experiment conducted in two Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, Hungary and Romania. We designed this experiment to reflect the fast and impulsive decision-making that is characteristic of online behavior on social media platforms. The results support the idea that individuals’ tendency to disseminate fake news is amplified by conditions of fast-paced and impulsive decision-making. The effect is particularly pronounced among respondents with higher right-wing authoritarian attitudes. This suggests that the fast and intuition-reliant nature of decision-making on social media encourages the spread of such misinformation that is in line with individuals’ ideological beliefs, which could increase social polarization in societies.