“It’s Not Literally True, But You Get the Gist:” How Nuanced Understandings of Truth Encourage People to Condone and Spread Misinformation

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We draw the gist-verbatim distinction from fuzzy trace theory (FTT), an account of how people process information [4]. According to FTT, when people encounter a statement (e.g., “unvaccinated children are 23 times more likely to get a disease than vaccinated children”), they encode, store, and retrieve the statement’s verbatim details (i.e., the specific, literal information; “23 times more likely”) separately from its gist (i.e., the general, overarching meaning; “unvaccinated children are not

Commentators have observed that public figures regularly get away with dishonesty, and that fake-news spreads fast and far on social media. One reason is that people sometimes believe this misinformation to be true [20] –– but a meaningful minority of people admit to sharing misinformation they do not believe. For example, in demographically-representative surveys of Americans, 14% of respondents admitted that they “share information on social media about politics even though [they] believe it

Julia A. Langdon: Conceptualization, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Project administration. Beth Anne Helgason: Conceptualization, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing. Judy Qiu: Conceptualization, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing. Daniel A. Effron: Conceptualization, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision.

☒ The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.