A little knowledge is a dangerous thing — no, seriously, it is, according to this new research | NiemanLab

I should probably not just skim the source research...

"It turns out that where you are on the “need for affect” scale also influences how right you think you are about news on Facebook, according to a paper published this week in Research and Politics:

We found that Facebook’s News Feed, with its short article previews, provides enough information for learning to occur. This in itself is an important and normatively positive finding: in a relatively new way of acquiring information, Facebook users are learning by merely scrolling through their News Feed. However, this learning comes with an additional consequence: audiences who only read article previews are overly confident in their knowledge, especially individuals who are motivated to experience strong emotions and, thus, tend to form strong opinions. These individuals demonstrating a high “need for affect” (Maio and Esses, 2001) are significantly more likely to overestimate their knowledge when encountering snippets of information in Facebook’s News Feed.

The authors, Nicolas Anspach, Jay Jennings, and Kevin Arceneaux, hypothesized that “those who are high in need for affect [would] form relatively strong opinions based on the limited information gleaned from the Facebook News Feed and, therefore, [would] be more likely to come away with an illusion of confidence in their knowledge relative to those who score lower on need for affect.” This hypothesis was borne out."

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing — no, seriously, it is, according to this new research | NiemanLab