Cognitive Vulnerability

Many people of the world have struggled to weed out fake news from real news. Scientific American has researched fake news intake differences in people with different levels of cognitive ability, with the expectation that lower cognitive levels make people more susceptible to believing false information. The study showed “people who scored low on a test of cognitive ability continued to be influenced by damaging information about the person even after they were explicitly told the information was false.” It proved that lower cognitive levels make it harder for people to “discard information” from their memory claiming “that repetition increased the subjects’ perception of the truthfulness of false statements, even for statements they knew to be false.” [1 image, 1 link, 3 quotations, 117 words]