Have you reposted or retweeted an article on social media without reading it first?
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that sharing articles on social media, whether we’ve read them or not, can make us think we know more about them than we actually do. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Adrian Ward, an assistant professor of marketing at UT Austin, said sharing articles online can cause us to assume an “expert” identity, making us overconfident of our knowledge in ways that can affect our behavior, too. The researchers’ findings have important implications in a world where much of the information we consume comes to us in the form of a tweet, post or TikTok.
