The Role of Personality in Fake News Sharing on Social Media: Reducing Extraverts’ Proclivity to Share Fake News

Fake news is a critical societal issue. Most lay people believe that it is important not to share fake news stories, but research shows that confirmation bias (the alignment between a story and the user’s prior opinions) has a stronger effect on the decision to share a news story than the belief that a news story is true. Research also shows that some users are more likely to deliberately share news stories they believe are false. We conducted three experiments examining the role that personality plays in active sharing (e.g., posting new messages, videos, or pictures) and passive sharing (e.g., liking or sharing messages) of news stories that the user believes to be true and false. We found that users high in two personality traits (extraversion and agreeableness) were consistently more likely to share news stories that they believed to be false. Extraversion had a stronger effect on the decision to actively share a story than belief in the story and confirmation bias combined. Extraverts were more likely to share news stories they believed to be false than introverts were to share stories they believed to be true. In other words, sharing fake news was influenced more by extraversion than by the recognition that the story was false. Surprisingly, conscientiousness had no effect; highly conscientious users were as likely as less conscientious users to share news stories they believed to be fake. We then developed a personality-based intervention and found that it reduced the likelihood that users would share a story they believed was false, and that it had the strongest effects on extraverts.