Regardless of age and politics, people who support lies are aware that they may be made up, researchers say.

Northeast researchers say that when confronted with “fake news,” Republicans and younger people are more likely to say they believe the fake headlines than Democrats and older people.

But overall, participants who were wrong about whether the headlines were true or false felt they were wrong, says lead author and North East professor Briony-Swire Thompson.

The study is published in the journal Communication psychology and goes against the idea that people who support misinformation firmly believe it to be true, she says.

“When people mistake false information for truth, they are aware that they could very well be wrong,” says Swire-Thompson, a professor of political science and psychology who directs the Disinformation Psychology Lab and faculty at the Network Science Institute.

About 500 participants recruited from across the country and split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, as well as younger and older adults, were presented with headlines based on news stories from the past year.

These included headlines such as “Fauci Wins Nobel Peace Prize” and “CDC Reveals to Be Private Nonprofit Corporation.”

Participants were asked whether the news was true or false and how confident they were in their choice, Swire-Thompson says.

“We first looked at how well people could distinguish true from false information. Older adults were better than younger adults and Republicans were worse than Democrats at distinguishing true from false information.” she says.

The results of the second part of the study, which looked at participants’ level of confidence in their answers, were a pleasant surprise, she says.

“Everyone was good at what we call metacognition, awareness of one’s own abilities,” which in this case was the ability to distinguish false information from real ones, Swire-Thompson says.

Those who got a wrong answer expressed a lower level of confidence in their answer, regardless of political party or age.

“We didn’t think people would be so good at this task,” Swire-Thompson says. “People are aware that they can be wrong, which I think is very important. It’s encouraging.”

“Most of the time when we think about misinformation, we imagine that people strongly endorse this misinformation,” when that’s not necessarily the case, she says.

Republicans “are just a little worse than Democrats” at discerning right from wrong, says study co-author Jorge Morales, an assistant professor of psychology and philosophy and director of Northeastern’s Subjectivity Lab.

“Republicans, however, know they are less able to discern the news,” Morales says. “Metacognitively speaking, Democrats and Republicans are very similar.”

“In general, Republicans showed ‘true bias’ (a tendency to rate items as true) for pro-Republican headlines, but ‘false bias’ (a tendency to rate items as false) for headlines pro-Democrats,” Swire-said Thompson.

“In contrast, Democrats have demonstrated false bias for pro-Democratic titles and little or no bias for Republican titles,” she says.

Older people are good at discerning fake news, but they share it anyway

The study results showing that older people are a little better at discerning fake news “is a really interesting finding, in part because we know that older people tend to share more fake news,” Morales says .

Determining the reasons might be a whole other study, but it could be that older people tend to share more information, Morales says. Think about the days when an older aunt or grandparent regularly sent newspaper clippings to younger family members.

If you share more information you find on social media, “you’ll also end up sharing more misinformation,” Morales says.

“Keep in mind that just because you share something doesn’t mean you believe it to be true,” says Swire-Thompson.

Morales says the study is “good news in the sense that at least it’s not something we have to solve or think about how to solve. People are already pretty good at calibrating their abilities.”

“The question is whether we can use this metacognitive knowledge to change people’s behavior in how they share or evaluate fake news or real news,” he says.

In academia, Northeast professors are working with California researchers on metacognition protocols that could help improve individuals’ ability to assess how well they are performing on a task, Morales says.

“Right now we’re working on very basic lab tasks, very simple vision and memory tasks, not related to current events.”

Ultimately, metacognition training could be extended to other contexts, Morales says.

Improved metacognition could help students determine when they need to spend more time studying or if they already know so much that it’s time to go out and have fun, Morales says.

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.