"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Whether or not this famous saying was ever uttered by the people to whom it is often attributed, it captures one of the defining challenges of the digital age. Every day, millions of people encounter stories online that are sensational, emotionally charged, and, sometimes, entirely false. Yet many of these stories spread faster than carefully verified journalism.
Why?
For nearly a decade, psychologists, computer scientists, communication scholars, and political scientists have been trying to answer this deceptively simple question. Their journey has transformed our understanding of fake news, revealing that there is no single explanation. Instead, fake news succeeds by exploiting multiple features of the human mind and the design of online platforms.
The First Big Idea: Novelty Wins
The modern scientific debate began with a landmark 2018 study by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, published in Science.
Analyzing millions of Twitter posts over more than a decade, the researchers discovered a striking pattern: false news spread farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truthful news. The difference was especially pronounced for political news, and surprisingly, it was driven primarily by human users rather than automated bots.
Why would people share false stories more enthusiastically than true ones?
The researchers proposed what has become known as the novelty hypothesis.
False stories are not constrained by reality. They can be crafted to be more surprising, more dramatic, and more unexpected than genuine news. Because humans are naturally attracted to novel information, these stories command attention and become more likely to be shared.
Novel information carries social value. Being the first person to tell friends about an astonishing event can enhance one's social standing. In this sense, fake news competes not by being accurate, but by being interesting.
But Is Novelty Enough?
The novelty hypothesis quickly became influential, but scientists soon began asking a different question.
Perhaps people do not share fake news because it is novel.
Perhaps they simply do not stop to ask whether it is true.
This alternative explanation emerged from a series of studies by Gordon Pennycook and David Rand.
Their work suggested that most people are not intentionally spreading misinformation. Instead, many users simply fail to pay sufficient attention to accuracy when deciding what to share. In experiments, merely reminding participants to think about whether a headline was true significantly improved the quality of the news they chose to share.
This became known as the inattention hypothesis.
Rather than asking,
"Is this true?"
people often ask,
"Is this interesting?"
or
"Will my friends react to this?"
The distinction turns out to matter enormously.
The Familiarity Trap
Ironically, another major body of research appears to contradict the novelty hypothesis.
Psychologists have long known about the illusory truth effect.
The principle is simple.
The more often we encounter a statement, the more likely we are to believe it—even if it is false.
This means fake news benefits from two seemingly opposite psychological forces.
Novel stories capture attention.
Repeated stories gain credibility.
A fabricated claim may initially go viral because it is shocking, but repeated exposure gradually makes it feel familiar and therefore believable.
In other words, fake news often begins as novelty and ends as familiarity.
Emotion: The Real Fuel?
As researchers continued studying online behaviour, another explanation emerged.
Perhaps people do not primarily share stories because they are novel.
Perhaps they share them because they are emotional.
Stories that evoke anger, outrage, fear, disgust, or moral indignation consistently generate more engagement than emotionally neutral reporting. High-arousal emotions motivate people to react immediately, often before they have evaluated whether the information is accurate.
This helps explain why so many viral headlines seem carefully engineered to provoke an emotional response.
Emotion accelerates sharing.
Reasoning slows it down.
Confirmation Bias: Hearing What We Already Believe
Another powerful force is confirmation bias.
Humans naturally prefer information that supports existing beliefs while discounting evidence that contradicts them.
This means fake news does not always need to be surprising.
Sometimes it succeeds because it tells people exactly what they already want to hear.
A politically motivated rumour, for example, may spread rapidly within a particular community not because it is novel but because it reinforces existing identities and expectations.
Truth becomes secondary to belonging.
Social Identity: Sharing as a Signal
Researchers have increasingly argued that sharing news is not only about informing others.
It is also about signalling identity.
When people repost political stories, they may be communicating:
"This is the kind of person I am."
"These are my values."
"This is my community."
Viewed this way, social media resembles a public stage.
The act of sharing becomes less about accuracy and more about expressing group membership.
The Invisible Hand of Algorithms
Human psychology tells only part of the story.
The platforms themselves matter.
Modern recommendation algorithms reward engagement.
Posts that generate comments, replies, outrage, or prolonged attention are often shown to more people.
Consequently, emotionally provocative content receives additional amplification regardless of its factual accuracy.
Algorithms do not necessarily distinguish between information that is compelling because it is true and information that is compelling because it is sensational.
Attention becomes the currency.
Accuracy becomes optional.
The Emerging Consensus
Over the past few years, researchers have increasingly moved away from searching for a single explanation.
Instead, fake news appears to spread because several mechanisms reinforce one another.
Novelty captures attention.
Emotion drives sharing.
Confirmation bias encourages acceptance.
Repeated exposure builds familiarity.
Social identity motivates public endorsement.
Algorithms amplify whatever generates engagement.
No single factor is sufficient on its own.
Together, however, they create an ecosystem in which misinformation can flourish.
A New Frontier: Measuring Novelty
Interestingly, one of the biggest open questions remains surprisingly fundamental.
What exactly is "novelty"?
Most studies estimate novelty by comparing language or semantic similarity between messages. But advances in artificial intelligence and information theory may allow much richer definitions.
Could we measure novelty using Shannon entropy, which quantifies information content?
Could Kolmogorov complexity estimate how compressible—or surprising—a message is?
Could modern language models estimate semantic surprise directly from billions of examples?
These approaches could help distinguish whether people respond to genuinely new information, emotionally surprising language, or simply unusual combinations of familiar ideas.
In other words, the next generation of fake news research may emerge not from psychology alone, but from collaborations between psychologists, computer scientists, linguists, and information theorists.
The Bigger Lesson
Perhaps the most important lesson from this research is that fake news is not primarily a technological problem.
It is a human problem amplified by technology.
Our brains evolved to notice novelty.
To remember emotionally significant events.
To trust familiar ideas.
To seek acceptance within groups.
Social media did not invent these tendencies.
It connected billions of human minds through algorithms that reward exactly these behaviours.
Understanding fake news therefore requires understanding ourselves.
The challenge is not merely to build better fact-checkers or smarter algorithms.
It is to cultivate habits of curiosity, critical thinking, and intellectual humility that can slow the irresistible urge to click "Share."
Because in an age where information travels at the speed of light, the greatest competitive advantage may simply be the willingness to pause for a moment and ask:
"Is it actually true?"
References
- Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The Spread of True and False News Online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.
- Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021). The Psychology of Fake News. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(5), 388–402.
- Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2019). Lazy, Not Biased: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39–50.
- Broda, E., & Strömbäck, J. (2024). Misinformation, Disinformation, and Fake News: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary, Systematic Literature Review. Annals of the International Communication Association.
- Munusamy, S., Syasyila, K., Abu Hassan Shaari, A., et al. (2024). Psychological Factors Contributing to the Creation and Dissemination of Fake News among Social Media Users: A Systematic Review. BMC Psychology.
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