What Does It Take to Fight Fake News? Testing the Influence of Political Knowledge, Media Literacy, and General Trust on Motivated Reasoning

0524332 - SOÚ 2021 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Kudrnáč, Aleš
What Does It Take to Fight Fake News? Testing the Influence of Political Knowledge, Media Literacy, and General Trust on Motivated Reasoning.
Communist and Post-Communist Studies. Roč. 53, č. 1 (2020), s. 151-167. ISSN 0967-067X. E-ISSN 1873-6920
Institutional support: RVO:68378025
Keywords : disinformation * motivated reasoning * civic education * media literacy * general trust
OECD category: Political science
Impact factor: 1.062, year: 2020
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://doi.org/10.1525/cpcs.2020.53.1.151

This study explores youth accuracy judgments of disinformative and nondisinformative claims. Analyses are based on a nationally representative youth (16–20 years old) survey experiment conducted in the Czech Republic in 2017. When they were exposed to posts regarding refugee crisis, young people were asked to judge the accuracy of the statements accompanying the posts. Motivated reasoning of youth depended primarily on the alignment with the posts and the ideology of participants. Results of this research suggest that motivated reasoning works differently for liberals and conservatives. Perceived amount of media literacy training does not seem to affect directional motivation. General trust works as moderator of motivated reasoning and, in combination with ideology, appears to be important for understanding directional motivation when exposed to disinformation.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0308695