Cognitive Processes and Personality Traits Underlying Four Phenotypes of Susceptibility to (Mis)Information

The paper, in plain language

Two axes, four kinds of news reader

With the Kraków group around Rafal Rygula, we had 184 US participants judge 24 COVID-19 headlines — half true, half false — in a social-media format, then crossed their scores: Knowers rate true news high and fake news low, Duffers do the reverse, Consumers believe both, Doubters believe neither. The taxonomy's point is that accuracy has two separable failure modes, and the generalized ones dominated: far more people were Consumers or Doubters than good or inverse discerners.

What distinguishes the phenotypes

Consumers scored higher than Doubters on grandiose narcissism — entitlement and vanity in particular — on drive for reward, and, in the engagement-based classification, showed less cognitive flexibility and a blunted response to positive feedback in a reversal-learning task. Doubters were the more anxious group. Among the discerners, Knowers carried a more optimistic judgment bias than Duffers. Several of the affective-cognitive tasks, though, showed nothing: feedback sensitivity and belief updating did not separate the veracity-based phenotypes.

Why it matters

Misinformation research often reduces to a single question — who falls for fake news — when the fuller question is how people apportion belief across everything they read. Blanket scepticism is a failure mode too: a Doubter is immune to lies at the cost of being unreachable by truth. The four-phenotype lens, later applied in our AI-based conspiracy work, keeps both errors in view. The usual cautions apply: a modest US sample, COVID-specific headlines, and small cells for the rarer phenotypes.