The link between tobacco smoking and susceptibility to misinformation

The paper, in plain language

An odd couple of research fields

Psychopharmacology and misinformation research rarely meet. With Rafal Rygula's laboratory in Kraków, Marta Piksa and colleagues, we asked whether tobacco smoking — with its well-documented effects on attention, memory and reward processing — tracks susceptibility to fake news. We compared three groups among 1,575 UK adults: people who had smoked within the hour, people who had smoked earlier, and non-smokers, all completing a validated misinformation susceptibility test.

What we found — and what stayed flat

Non-smokers recognized fake news better than both smoking groups, with education, gender, stress and impulsivity controlled. True-news recognition did not differ, so this is not general gullibility about news. Notably, it made no difference whether the cigarette was minutes or hours ago — which points away from acute nicotine effects or withdrawal and toward something associated with prolonged use.

The honest print

The effect is small — under one percent of variance explained — and we say plainly in the paper that other cognitive and social factors likely matter far more. The design is cross-sectional: smoking status was self-reported, never-smokers and former smokers were not separated, and no causal arrow can be drawn in either direction. The mechanisms we discuss, from receptor downregulation to attentional deficits, are hypotheses for future experiments, not conclusions.

Why it matters

Misinformation research has been dominated by cognitive style — who reasons analytically, who relies on gut feeling. This collaboration probes a different layer: whether pharmacological states shift the same judgments. Together with our companion study on sertraline treatment, it sketches the beginnings of a neurochemistry of misinformation susceptibility — speculative territory that only careful experiments can settle.