**1. Introduction**

As the world changes, so too does the way we consume news information. According to survey data, nearly two thirds of people now prefer to read news online [1]. Moreover, those data also indicate that the preference for online news is growing: Of those who say they prefer to watch the news, the proportion who prefer to watch it online almost doubled between 2016 and 2018 [1]. This online access provides people with additional sources of news information and has the potential to widen the scope and quality of the news people encounter. One consequence could be a more well-informed public. However, another

**Citation:** Michael, R.B.; Sanson, M. Source Information Affects Interpretations of the News across Multiple Age Groups in the United States. *Societies* **2021**, *11*, 119. https:// doi.org/10.3390/soc11040119

Academic Editors: Eugène Loos and Loredana Ivan

Received: 27 August 2021 Accepted: 28 September 2021 Published: 1 October 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

possible consequence is an increase in exposure to "fake news"—a catchall term used by both academics and laypeople to mean content that appears news-like, but varies in how false it is and how harmful it is intended to be [2–4]. This fake news continuum spans (but is not limited to) unprofessional journalism, sponsored content, political propaganda, and wholly fabricated information [2–4]. In the research reported here, we address the general question: How do people across a wide range of ages evaluate the credibility of reported news information?

Presumably, people expect the truth from the news and are motivated to not fall prey to fake news. In other words, people have "accuracy goals" when reasoning about the news [5]. However, news consumers are faced with a difficult challenge because news information is experienced indirectly and therefore carries a degree of ambiguity. How, then, do people determine whether news is true or false? We suspect that people behave as they do under other situations of ambiguity and draw on information beyond the news itself to guide their behavior [6–8].

More specifically, when evaluating whether news is true or false, people could rely only on the central content itself: a headline, the text of an article, or the words spoken by a reporter. However, this task is relatively effortful, particularly under conditions of ambiguity. An easier alternative is to draw on more peripheral cues to help guide evaluations of the news [8]. We therefore predict that people will try to answer the difficult question of whether news is "real" by asking themselves an easier question: Is the source of that news credible [8–10]? In attempting to answer that easier question, people can adopt a less effortful thinking style and draw on their feelings about the source as well as any pre-existing beliefs [6,11–13]. When adopting such a thinking style, people may be swayed by "directional goals," unwittingly relying on evaluative strategies that lead to a desired conclusion but away from the goal of not falling prey to fake news [5].

In this paper, we focus on one piece of information that may play a role in people's evaluations of the news: political affiliation. Evidence now suggests that political affiliation plays a role in determining which news sources people believe produce real or fake news. Specifically, people in the United States who lean politically left rate news sources favored by people who lean politically right more as sources of fake news. The reverse is also true, with people who lean politically right rating news sources favored by people who lean politically left more as sources of fake news [14,15]. Consistent with these findings, survey data show that people are becoming increasingly selective about their media exposure, narrowing down to sources that match their ideology [16]. This trend is especially problematic when politicians actively disseminate falsehoods, for example, [17], and is worsened when news sources adopt poor journalistic standards and misinform the public. In fact, people are increasingly concerned about the integrity of news sources: Public distrust in the media is growing [18–20]. Taken together, this literature is informative about how people choose and evaluate news sources, but is less informative about how people evaluate the news content itself.

What we do not know, then, is the extent to which people's beliefs about news sources affect evaluations of the news. If source credibility acts as a guide, then source information may have consequences for how people interpret and remember the news. Consistent with this idea, we already know that trusted stimuli—like photographs—can change how people remember the news [21,22]. We also know that more credible sources of information generally produce more attitude change, for a review, see [23], and that more credible sources of misinformation are more misleading [24,25]. However, other factors can sometimes change these relationships. Older adults, for example, are more easily misled than younger adults [26,27].

Source information could convey the credibility of reported news, but where does that credibility come from? It may be the product of a number of underlying factors. For example, source credibility could be due to people's beliefs about journalistic integrity, including what standards or processes should be required to declare a piece of information "true" [18–20,28]. Credibility could also be due to the extent to which a news source aligns

with a person's political views [14]. It could also arise as the product of confirmation bias: the extent to which the news content is consistent with and therefore reinforces pre-existing beliefs [12,13].

In an effort to understand what people believe about news information from various sources, we ran two initial experiments (1a and 1b) in which we asked people across a wide range of ages to rate how real (versus fake) they believed a series of news headlines were, varying the ostensible source of those headlines. From related work, we know that political affiliation predicts which sources people believe are credible and that analytical thinking predicts the ability to discern real headlines from fake ones [14,29]. We therefore hypothesized that source information can act as a heuristic cue that people turn to when faced with the difficult task of determining whether headlines are real or fake news. We predicted that people would rate headlines from sources favored by their political affiliation as "real news" more than they would headlines from other sources.

We then followed up on these initial experiments with two additional experiments (2a and 2b) in which we investigated the extent to which people's interpretations of a more familiar and real-world "fake news" event would be affected by the source of information about that event. We predicted that people's interpretations of the event would differ depending on their political views and which version of the event—real or fake—they were exposed to. Across both sets of experiments, we also examined the influence of age in additional exploratory analyses.

## **2. Experiment 1a**

The preregistration for this experiment is available at https://aspredicted.org/zs5kv. pdf (accessed on 27 September 2021). The data were collected between 31 January and 21 April 2018.
