News Finds Me as the illusion of competence: evidence for overconfidence in discernment of political misinformation

Empirical research connects the News Finds Me perception (NFM) with undesirable democratic outcomes. Consequently, high-NFM individuals may be more vulnerable to political misinformation than low-NFM individuals. In this two-wave, preregistered news judgment study (N=867 US adults), we explore the possibility that high-NFM individuals overestimate their ability to detect misinformation—a phenomenon grounded in the Dunning–Kruger effect, whereby individuals with limited competence fail to recognize their shortcomings. As hypothesized, high-NFM (vs. low-NFM) participants reported greater overconfidence in their false news discernment ability—an effect driven by their objectively lower discernment ability. We also find that the more overconfident high-NFM people were, the greater their intentions to engage with false and true news, although their overconfidence was especially likely to predict intentions to engage with false news. These findings suggest the NFM plays a dually negative role in promoting susceptibility to misinformation, highlighting the need for targeted intervention efforts.