Research Information System
Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, 14 - 16 July 2020
The phenomena that have emerged with a dramatic increase in the speed of technological
development have affected many aspects of social and political life. One of these facts is the
extraordinary growth in the amount and access to information. However, this information
may not always reflect reality in life. With the development of technology, especially in
social media, it has become easier to spread fake information. In the literature, fake news has
been mostly studied in the media field. However, it is crucial to address the spread of fake
news with a social psychological point of view. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to examine
the relation between fake news and social-psychological variables. We archived real social
media (facebook and twitter) posts and measured various psychological characteristics of
participants during the 31 March 2019 local elections of Turkey. Additionally, we developed
the Fake News Questioning Scale to measure the tendency of questioning whether news on
social media is fake or not and examine its relations with thinking styles, party affiliations,
identification with ethnicity, social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism,
conspiracy beliefs, and intergroup threat. As a result, we found that intuitive and analytical
thinking styles predict the questioning of news, but social dominance orientation, right-wing
authoritarianism and conspiracy beliefs did not. We discussed the motivations behind the
tendency to questioning and sharing fake news from a social psychological perspective.