Center for Social Data Analytics Colloquium Speaker: Bertram Gawronski

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The Center for Social Data Analytics will be hosting Bertram Gawronski, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.  His talk will be held on Thursday, September 19, 12 -1 p.m. in B001 Sparks (the Databasement). His talk is titled: "Why Do People Fall for Misinformation?". 

Bio: Dr. Bertram Gawronski is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his PhD in 2001 at Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. Before joining the University of Texas at Austin in 2014, he was a Professor and Canada Research Chair at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. His research uses a social-cognitive approach to address three fundamental questions: (1) How do people make evaluative judgments (good vs. bad)? (2) How do people make truth judgments (true vs. false)? (3) How do people make moral judgments (right vs. wrong)?

Abstract: Misinformation represents one of the greatest challenges for the functioning of societies in the information age. In the current talk, I will draw on Signal Detection Theory to identify two distinct factors in misinformation susceptibility: truth sensitivity, conceptualized as accurate discrimination between true and false information, and partisan bias, conceptualized as lower acceptance threshold for ideology-congruent information compared to ideology-incongruent information. I will present the results of several studies that investigated (1) the extent to which acceptance of misinformation is accounted for by truth sensitivity and partisan bias and (2) determinants and correlates of truth sensitivity and partisan bias in responses to misinformation. The findings provide nuanced insights into why people fall for misinformation and suggest potential strategies to combat the spread of misinformation.