The influences of personality and motivation on the sharing of misinformation on social media

Chen, Xinran

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/89327 Copy

Description

Title

The influences of personality and motivation on the sharing of misinformation on social media

Author(s)

Chen, Xinran

Issue Date

2016-03-15

Keyword(s)

• misinformation
• personality
• motivation
• information characteristic
• social media

Abstract

Social media, featuring rich user-generated information, is becoming an important component of daily life. It has also become a fertile ground for misinformation (inaccurate information) due to lack of quality control mechanisms. This study proposed and directly tested three predictor categories – personality, motivation, and perceived characteristic of information – to understand users’ misinformation sharing on social media. A survey was conducted with 171 university students. The findings showed that user-intrinsic factors and three motivation factors played influential roles in the sharing behavior. We thus concluded that people’s sharing of misinformation on social media is mainly influenced by their personalities or specific motivations. The action of sharing, rather than the perceived accuracy and characteristics of the information being shared, is what matters most. In light of the findings, besides teaching information evaluating skills, professionals responsible for information literacy training may also want to address the non-informational motivations that propel misinformation sharing.

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

IConference 2016 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89327

DOI

https://doi.org/10.9776/16145

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 is held by the authors. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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