Do people believe in misleading information disseminated via memes? The role of identity and anger

Abstract

Do people believe in misleading information disseminated via contemporary Internet memes? Do they believe in it more compared with information provided via text? This research explores these questions via a 3 (modality: contemporary internet meme vs text-only vs text-with-explanation) × 2 (identity-congruence: congruent vs incongruent) between-subject online experiment, using two contexts of investigation (crime and taxes). Findings indicate that identity-congruent posts (vs incongruent), regardless of modality, were perceived as more credible. These effects occurred due to the invocation of the self-identity heuristic (if content is similar to my identity, then it is automatically credible) and the other-identity heuristic (if content is similar to the identity of others in my network, then it is automatically credible). However, the effects of identity-congruent posts were diminished when the content was presented as a contemporary Internet meme (vs text). This occurred because identity-congruent posts in meme modality evoke anger.