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      The Misinformation Receptivity Framework : Political Misinformation and Disinformation as Cognitive Bayesian Inference Problems

      1 , 2 , 3
      European Psychologist
      Hogrefe Publishing Group

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          Abstract

          Abstract: Evaluating the truthfulness of new information is a difficult and complex task. Notably, there is currently no unified theoretical framework that addresses the questions of (1) how individuals discern whether political information is true or (deliberately) false, (2) under what conditions individuals are most susceptible to believing misinformation, and (3) how the structure of political and communicative environments skews cognitive processes of truth, discernment, and interpretation generation. To move forward, we propose the Misinformation Receptivity Framework (MRF). Building on Bayesian and probabilistic models of cognition, the MRF suggests that we can conceptualize misinformation receptivity as a cognitive inference problem in which the reliability of incoming misinformation is weighed against the reliability of prior beliefs. This “reliability-weighting” process can model when individuals adopt or reject misinformation, as well as the ways in which they creatively generate interpretations rather than passively discern truth versus falsehood. Moreover, certain communication contexts can lead people to rely excessively on incoming (mis)information or conversely to rely excessively on prior beliefs. The MRF postulates how such environmental properties can heighten the persuasiveness of different kinds of misinformation. For instance, the MRF predicts that noisy communication contexts, in which the reliability of inputs is ambiguous, make people susceptible to highly partisan and ideological misinformation or disinformation that amplifies their existing belief systems. By contrast, the MRF predicts that contextual instability renders people susceptible to misinformation that would be considered extreme or worldview-incongruent in conditions of stability. The MRF formally delineates the interactions between cognitive and communicative mechanisms, offering insights and testable hypotheses on when, how, and why different kinds of misinformation proliferate.

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          The spread of true and false news online

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              Is Open Access

              Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self.

              The concept of the brain as a prediction machine has enjoyed a resurgence in the context of the Bayesian brain and predictive coding approaches within cognitive science. To date, this perspective has been applied primarily to exteroceptive perception (e.g., vision, audition), and action. Here, I describe a predictive, inferential perspective on interoception: 'interoceptive inference' conceives of subjective feeling states (emotions) as arising from actively-inferred generative (predictive) models of the causes of interoceptive afferents. The model generalizes 'appraisal' theories that view emotions as emerging from cognitive evaluations of physiological changes, and it sheds new light on the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie the experience of body ownership and conscious selfhood in health and in neuropsychiatric illness. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                European Psychologist
                European Psychologist
                Hogrefe Publishing Group
                1016-9040
                1878-531X
                July 2023
                July 2023
                : 28
                : 3
                : 173-188
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK
                [2 ]Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, UK
                [3 ]Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
                Article
                10.1027/1016-9040/a000498
                bd80f606-b345-469c-8edd-e41f7993f9a2
                © 2023
                History

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