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Receiving vs. believing (mis)information from friends: experimental evidence from India

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  • Narang, Jimmy

Abstract

Do people believe a news story more if it is shared by a friend? Should they? I investigate this using experiments in India with 800 pairs of friends and a custom social-media platform. I find sharers can distinguish true from false stories but share both equally, making sharing uninformative about a story's truth. Receivers, however, interpret sharing as a sign of truth: they overestimate how well sharers’ beliefs predict veracity; discount how factors besides belief influence sharing decisions; and update the most on stories they least believed initially. Altogether, stories gain (unmerited) credibility from being shared by a friend

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  • Narang, Jimmy, 2024. "Receiving vs. believing (mis)information from friends: experimental evidence from India," OSF Preprints h7pue, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:h7pue
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/h7pue
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. David M. Grether, 1980. "Bayes Rule as a Descriptive Model: The Representativeness Heuristic," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 95(3), pages 537-557.
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