Role of political motivations, cognition, and personality traits in political misinformation engagement

• Main Author: Tan, Han Wei
• Other Authors: Saifuddin Ahmed
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Social sciences::Communication
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155862
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The present study integrates political motivations, cognitive ability, and personality traits within the same framework to understand why individuals believe and share political misinformation. Two studies are conducted in the US using a nationally representative survey sample. Study 1 analyzes the effects of participants’ political motivations, cognitive ability, and the Big-Five personality on misinformation engagement. Study 2 replicates Study 1 by focusing on political motivations and cognitive ability and extends the framework to include different dimensions of personality in dark and light triads. Overall, the results show that political motivations and cognitive ability are critical in understanding political misinformation engagement. High levels of extraversion and low agreeableness are established to protect against belief in political misinformation. A high level of agreeableness and conscientiousness also protects against sharing of political misinformation. In addition, high openness and low cognitive ability increase susceptibility to misinformation engagement. High levels of psychopathy increase belief in misinformation, while high levels of Kantianism protect against sharing political misinformation. Our results on political motivations are consistent with the theory of identity-protective and the theory of ideologically-motivated cognition. However, for misinformation sharing behavior, partial evidence points toward the preference-based account and the goal-oriented polarization theory, but not accuracy-oriented motivations.