Original studyFrontiers in Psychology, 2026Read the paper →
Fake news spreads quickly online, and false claims about vaccines and climate change can shape what people believe. How well people can tell a made-up story from a true one varies widely. A large Italian survey suggests distrust of scientists and experts goes hand in hand with a weaker ability to tell true headlines from false ones.
Researchers at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan and the University of Siena surveyed 3,025 adults from an opt-in online panel, stratified by gender, age, and area, which the authors describe as nationally representative. The study appears in Frontiers in Psychology. It was funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research under a PNRR PRIN grant for the COUNTERCONS prebunking project (2022MK9SZ5), which means warning people about false claims in advance.
Dr Mauro Bertolotti, associate professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, said: “The study was part of a larger project investigating the psychological roots of misinformation in order to develop functional, effective, and possibly personalised ways of countering it. The idea was to first understand what doesn’t work in the way people process online news (or what, conversely, does work), and then create interventions that specifically target those dysfunctional processes and train the functional ones.”
Participants were aged 18 to 100, with an average age of about 51, and took part in summer 2024. Each person was randomly given one of three topics: vaccinations, climate change, or the war in Ukraine. They saw six short headlines, a mix of real and fake, and judged each real or fake.
The headlines were based on real stories from Italian news websites and on false stories shared on social media. Two rounds of testing with volunteers were used to even out difficulty across the three topics. Participants also answered questions on politics, views of science, and thinking style.
Science-related populism pits ordinary people against an academic elite and questions who holds true knowledge. Conspiracy mentality is a general tendency to believe that hidden, powerful groups control events. Need for cognition describes how much a person enjoys effortful thinking, while need for cognitive closure is the wish for a firm answer rather than ambiguity.
Science-related populism was the strongest predictor of lower scores. People who placed themselves further to the political right did slightly worse than those on the left, and a stronger conspiracy mentality was linked to a small drop in accuracy. The authors suggest that distrust of mainstream sources such as scientists mattered more than specific political beliefs.
Thinking style worked in the other direction. People with a higher need for cognition did better, as expected. More surprisingly, so did people with a high need for closure, perhaps because the task made them worry about getting answers wrong, so they took more care.
Bertolotti said: “The biggest takeaway of our study, I believe, lies in the peculiar balance of factors predicting susceptibility to misinformation among our participants. People often discuss misinformation in terms of political bias and polarisation (both taking advantage of it, and promoting it further), but our results show that partisanship is only one part of the equation, and people tend to fall for fake news also due to some deeper psychological dimensions that pertain to how they approach information itself: whether they consider the news part of a ‘culture war’ struggle between the people and the elites (science-related populism), whether they consider them something to be always doubted and searched for hidden meanings (conspiracy mentality), or, conversely, whether they see them as a genuine source of new and interesting information (need for cognition).”
He added: “Participants with high need for cognitive closure, that is a need for unambiguous, clear and certain information, were actually quite good at recognising real and fake headlines in our experiment: this might be the case because they are motivated to scan headlines and news for inconsistencies and weak spots, which makes them more easily aware of some misinformation they encounter online (perhaps the more sloppy kind).”
Topic made a difference too. On average, participants judged about 73% of Ukraine headlines correctly, compared with 70% for climate change and 67% for vaccinations. The links with right-wing views and conspiracy mentality were strongest for vaccine headlines, which the authors tie to heated debate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study has clear limits. It was a one-off survey, so it cannot show that any of these traits cause people to misjudge real or fake headlines, and the model as a whole explained only about 13% of the differences in scores. The war in Ukraine was big news at the time, which may have made those headlines easier, and the headlines were text only, without images.
Looking ahead, Bertolotti said: “We have already conducted some studies on how certain types of communication (prebunking interventions in particular) can undo the damage created by misinformation and potentially even reverse it, making individuals who are more susceptible to it able to spot fake news and have a more critical approach to information in general. An early attempt at this was published a few years ago, and a couple of other papers are coming (hopefully) soon: one focuses on the interplay between different types of prebunking interventions and conspiracy mentality and science-related populism (it’s a direct follow-up to this study, in this sense), and another investigated whether prebunking messages can be specifically designed (using AI) to appeal to individuals with different personality profiles, based on the Big Five personality model.”
The findings come from Italy alone, and the authors call for studies in other countries. They suggest prebunking campaigns could turn spotting fake news into a kind of quest, which might appeal to people who want clear answers. Scientific topics may need extra attention, they add, because fewer people have the knowledge and confidence to judge them.
