Rethinking the link between cognitive reflection and susceptibility to political misinformation: distinguishing hard from soft news

The literature presents two contrasting accounts on how cognitive reflection (overriding intuition with deliberation) influences susceptibility to political misinformation. According to the classical reasoning account, predominantly rooted in research of soft news, cognitive reflection improves discernment of true from false information. According to the motivated reasoning account, rooted in research on hard (policy-related) issues, individuals prone to cognitive reflection display stronger political bias and fall for politically-congruent misinformation. We integrate these accounts by examining how the soft-hard distinction interacts with individuals’ reasoning style to shape truth discernment and susceptibility to political bias. An integrative data analysis (IDA) combined data from 18 political misinformation studies (N = 41,289) with independent soft-hard news ratings. Additionally, two experiments (N = 666), in the U.S. and Greece, exposed participants to either soft or hard news. Across all datasets, participants prone to cognitive reflection displayed stronger political bias, but only when evaluating hard news. Cognitive reflection was associated with improved truth discernment for soft and hard news in the IDA, but not consistently so in the experiments. Our findings reconcile discrepancies in misinformation research and demonstrate that cognitive reflection is not a one-size-fits-all solution to political misinformation as it can exacerbate bias in policy-related issues.