All Eyes on Misinformation and Social Media Consumption: A Pupil Dilation Study

The research on misinformation has shown that those users who spend cognitive resources while reading news on social media are more likely to identify fake headlines. Although various behavioral and neurophysiological measures have been used in the literature to examine this hypothesis, the association between pupil dilation, which has been established as a measure of cognitive load in the NeuroIS field, and users’ performance in judging the accuracy of headlines has yet to be studied. A within subject experiment using different types of news headlines is designed in which users rate the accuracy of 80 Facebook posts. Consistent with the heuristic-systematic model of information processing (HSM), our results suggest that pupil dilation is positively linked with users’ accuracy rate.