Ana Guinote (PR, UCL London) motifs de pouvoir, croyances et propagation de la désinformation

Ana Guinote est professeure de cognition sociale à UCL à Londres. Elle a notamment coédité l'ouvrage The Social Psychology of Power.

Elle abordera le lundi les thématiques de "motifs de pouvoir, croyances et propagation de la désinformation".

A small number of active social media users are responsible for misinformation
dissemination (Grinberg et al., 2019). We investigated the role of power motives in beliefs and spreading of misinformation. In four online studies (N = 1882) participants engaged in a social media simulation task, where they could spread reliable and unreliable information the MIST-20 (Maertens et al., 2024). Power motivated individuals -measured as trait dominance, power values, or desire to influence online- were more active and disproportionately spread misinformation, in spite of being aware of spreading misinformation. Power motives drove the effects and not actual power in natural and experimental settings (Guinote et al., 2025). Two further studies (N > 600) assessed beliefs in true and fake news of MIST-20. Using a signal detection framework, both dominance and power values negatively predicted discrimination sensitivity but not response threshold. Furthermore, power motives and the proportion of fake news believed jointly predicted the proportion of fake news shared in a simulation task, showing that beliefs play a role in misinformation sharing
among dominant individuals. I will discuss factors implicated in beliefs in misinformation among power motivated individuals, including moral disengagement and sense of power that derives from sharing misinformation.