Which linguistic cues make people fall for fake news? A comparison of
  cognitive and affective processing
Bernhard Lutz Marc Adam Stefan Feuerriegel Nicolas Pröllochs Dirk Neumann
Fake news on social media has large, negative implications for society.
However, little is known about what linguistic cues make people fall for fake
news and, hence, how to design effective countermeasures for social media. In
this study, we seek to understand which linguistic cues make people fall for
fake news. Linguistic cues (e.g., adverbs, personal pronouns, positive emotion
words, negative emotion words) are important characteristics of any text and
also affect how people process real vs. fake news. Specifically, we compare the
role of linguistic cues across both cognitive processing (related to careful
thinking) and affective processing (related to unconscious automatic
evaluations). To this end, we performed a within-subject experiment where we
collected neurophysiological measurements of 42 subjects while these read a
sample of 40 real and fake news articles. During our experiment, we measured
cognitive processing through eye fixations, and affective processing in situ
through heart rate variability. We find that users engage more in cognitive
processing for longer fake news articles, while affective processing is more
pronounced for fake news written in analytic words. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first work studying the role of linguistic cues in fake
news processing. Altogether, our findings have important implications for
designing online platforms that encourage users to engage in careful thinking
and thus prevent them from falling for fake news.