A short review on susceptibility to falling for fake political news

This review discusses recent findings on individuals’ susceptibility to falling for fake news in the political context. Considering political attitudes and analytical thinking, we find that individuals tend to overrate the accuracy of true and fake political news that are consistent with their own political attitudes. This tendency, however, cannot be explained by motivated reasoning. This is supported by findings showing that analytical thinking is negatively related to susceptibility to falling for fake news, regardless of whether they are consistent or inconsistent with one’s political attitudes. We suggest that future works should aim at i) examining how, for example, news consumption habits relate to susceptibility to falling for fake news and ii) implementing other, more external valid fake news tests.