In our fraught political climate, we are getting more and more dubious information from less than trustworthy sources.
Bowling Green State University Assistant Professor in the School of Educational Foundations, Leadership and Policy Dr. Christy Galletta Horner and her team of researchers dived into how our emotional reactions to the online content we see primes us to believe and spread fake news. Horner and her team studied how 879 people from across the political spectrum responded to eight fake news headlines centered around the 2020 election.
There is a whole industry — the so called "economics of emotion" — built to take advantage of those responses, further incentivizing the production and spread of misinformation. But there are ways to resist it as well, experts say.
Dr. Galletta Horner joins Cincinnati Edition with BGSU Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication Dr. Rick Busselle to talk about her study and how fake news plays on our emotions.
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