Susceptibility to misinformation as a function of motivated reasoning and news topic: findings from a national representative survey

Introduction While previous research has shown that susceptibility to misinformation is associated with political orientation and psychosocial processes, the role of misinformation content or topic has so far been scarcely investigated, particularly in research using data collected from representative samples. Methods In this study, conducted with a representative sample of Italians (N = 3,025), we investigated the ability to distinguish between real and fake news as a function of political orientation, science-related populism, conspiracy mentality, need for cognition, and need for cognitive closure. Results The results showed that, in general, participants who were more susceptible to misinformation held right-wing, populist, and conspiracist worldviews, as well as a low need for cognition and a low need for closure. Regarding misinformation topic, participants tended to perform better on a purely political topic (i.e., the war in Ukraine) than on topics that also had scientific relevance (i.e., climate change, vaccinations). Discussion The discussion relates our findings to the broader literature on motivated reasoning and susceptibility to misinformation.