Third-person effect about people’s ability to detect misinformation and media diets: how news consumption patterns influence the intensity of the effect

Third-person effect about people’s ability to detect misleading information in the media has been largely studied in the last years. A large number of studies suggest a strong effect: most people tend to overestimate their own capacity to detect “fake news”, while underestimating the capacity of (close and distant) others in this direction. Explanations about this effect remain, though, largely speculative. Most significant predictors point towards news consumption patterns, social media dependency, confirmation bias, and perceived incidence of misleading information in the media. By means of a national survey (N=1000) conducted in Romania, the present study digs deeper into the explanations related to this particular type of third-person effect, by looking into the type of news consumers and the intensity of the third-person effect. Results show that significant predictors of this effect are critical thinking disposition, perceived exposure to fake news, and news consumption patterns (especially social media news consumption). When looking into news consumption patterns, there is a significant difference in the intensity of the effect between people who consume mostly mainstream media news (for which the effect is the strongest), news minimalists (who rarely consume news at all), social media news consumers, and hyper-media news consumers (for whom the effect is the weakest). However, perceived incidence of “fake news” does not differ much among the four types of news consumers. This provides new insights into how such biased perceptions are formed and the role the media play in this equation.