(Un)Real: The role of cognitive biases in young people’s assessment of news accuracy

This article explores the role that cognitive biases may play in the mechanisms through which individuals assess the truthfulness of news, both real and false. Using a quantitative survey conducted among 571 undergraduate and graduate students, this paper focuses on examining the relationship between three cognitive biases, namely confirmation bias, the third-person effect, and illusory superiority, and young people’s ability to accurately distinguish between real and fake news with a focus on news related with the Ukraine-Russia conflict. The findings indicate that confirmation bias is one of the psychological mechanisms that negatively impact young people’s ability to correctly identify real news and detect false news. In contrast, the effects of the illusory superiority bias are mixed: on the one hand, the absence of this bias enhances news detection abilities, while on the other, individuals who exhibit a stronger sense of superiority tend to perform better in assessing the truthfulness of news.