Download pdf
Misinformation and Personality: Big-5 Trait Related to Misinformation Believing and Sharing
- 1 The University of Sydney
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
With the advancement of media and the proliferation of new digital platforms, the Internet has become the primary channel through which individuals access information. However, this shift has also heightened the likelihood of people believing and sharing misinformation. This article explores the relationship between personality traits and the propensity to believe and share misinformation. Through a comprehensive literature review, the associations between the Big Five personality traits and misinformation are analyzed and summarized. The findings suggest that extraversion is positively associated with the belief in and sharing of misinformation, whereas conscientiousness and agreeableness are negatively associated with these behaviors. In contrast, openness to experience and neuroticism do not show a significant relationship with misinformation, belief, or sharing. At the specific period, extroversion, openness to experience and neuroticism show the positive relationship with misinformation believing. Moreover, extroversion has positive relationship with misinformation sharing during epidemic period. Effective interventions to mitigate the belief in and sharing of misinformation can include strategies such as leveraging social norms, peer influence, and promoting critical thinking. However, these interventions should be tailored to align with different personality traits to maximize their effectiveness.
Keywords
Misinformation, Personality, Media psychology, Social media.
[1]. Shu, K., Wang, S., Lee, D., & Liu, H. (2020). Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media: Emerging Research Challenges and Opportunities (1st Edition 2020). Springer International Publishing AG.
[2]. Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). Uses and gratifications research. Public Opinion Quarterly, 37, 509–523.
[3]. Guess, A. M., & Lyons, B. A. (2020). Misinformation, disinformation, and online propaganda. In N. Persily, & J. A. Tucker (Eds.), Social media and democracy: the state of the field, prospects for reform Cambridge University Press, pp. 10–33.
[4]. World Health Organization. (2020). Managing the COVID-19 infodemic: Promoting healthy behaviours and mitigating the harm from misinformation and disinformation, September. https://bit.ly/3oTiP9v.
[5]. Buchanan, M. (2020). Managing the infodemic. Nature Physics, 16(9), 894.
[6]. Mian, A.; Khan, S. (2020) Coronavirus: The spread of misinformation. BMC Med..
[7]. Niburski, K.; Niburski. (2020) O. Impact of Trump’s promotion of unproven COVID-19 treatments and subsequent Internet trends:Observational study. J. Med. Internet Res.
[8]. Harff, D., Bollen, C., & Schmuck, D. (2022). Responses to Social Media Influencers’ Misinformation about COVID-19: A Pre-Registered Multiple-Exposure Experiment. Media Psychology, 25(6), 831-850.
[9]. Roozenbeek, J.; Schneider, C.R.; Dryhurst, S.; Kerr, J.; Freeman, A.L.; Recchia, G.; Van Der Bles, A.M.; Van Der Linden, S. (2020) Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world. R. Soc. Open Sci.
[10]. Cheng, J.W.; Nishikawa, M. (2022) Effects of health literacy in the fight against the COVID-19 infodemic: The case of Japan. Health Commun. 37, 1520-1533.
[11]. Ahmed, S., & Tan, H. W. (2022). Personality and perspicacity: Role of personality traits and cognitive ability in political misinformation discernment and sharing behavior. Personality and Individual Differences, 196.
[12]. Sun, Y., & Xie, J. (2024). Who shares misinformation on social media? A meta-analysis of individual traits related to misinformation sharing. Computers in Human Behavior, 158.
[13]. Lin, H., Wang, C., & Sun, Y. (2024). How big five personality traits influence information sharing on social media: A meta analysis. PloS One, 19(6), e0303770.
[14]. C.G. DeYoung. (2015). Cybernetic big five theory. Journal of Research in Personality, 56, 33-58.
[15]. Altay, S., Hacquin, A. S., & Mercier, H. (2020). Why do so few people share fake news? It hurts their reputation. New Media & Society, 24(6), 1303–1324.
[16]. Duffy, A., Tandoc, E., & Ling, R. (2020). Too good to be true, too good not to share: The social utility of fake news. Information, Communication & Society, 23(13), 1965–1979.
[17]. Sindermann, C., Schmitt, H. S., Rozgonjuk, D., Elhai, J. D., & Montag, C. (2021). The evaluation of fake and true news: on the role of intelligence, personality, interpersonal trust, ideological attitudes, and news consumption. Heliyon, 7(3), e06503–e06503.
[18]. Liu, D., & Campbell, W. K. (2017). The Big Five personality traits, Big Two metatraits and social media: A meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 70, 229–240.
[19]. R.E. Guadagno, B.M. Okdie, C.A. Eno. (2008). Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging. Computers in Human Behavior, 24 (5), 1993-2004.
Cite this article
Chen,X. (2024). Misinformation and Personality: Big-5 Trait Related to Misinformation Believing and Sharing. Communications in Humanities Research,47,25-29.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).