研究:即使有准确的信息，人类也会“自我制造错误信息”

研究:即使有准确的信息，人类也会“自我制造错误信息”

Although social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter have taken heat for spreading misinformation, it turns out that we — all of us — may be our own worst enemies in the battle against the scourge of fake news.

尽管Facebook和Twitter等社交媒体巨头因传播错误信息而备受指责，但事实证明，在打击假新闻的斗争中，我们所有人都可能是自己最大的敌人。

A new study found that people given accurate statistics on controversial topics tend to misremember those numbers in order to fit their own commonly held beliefs.

一项新的研究发现，人们对有争议的话题给出准确的统计数据时，为了符合自己的普遍信念，往往会记错这些数字。

In the study, when people were shown that the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States declined recently — which is true but has gone against most people’s beliefs — they tended to recall the opposite.

在这项研究中，当人们看到美国的墨西哥移民数量最近有所下降时——这是事实，但与大多数人的信念相悖——他们往往会回忆起相反的事情。

For example, most people believed that the number of Mexican immigrants in the US grew between 2007 and 2014. But, in fact, the number declined from 12.8 million in 2007 to 11.7 million in 2014.

例如，大多数人认为，美国的墨西哥移民数量在2007年至2014年间有所增长。但事实上，这个数字从2007年的1280万下降到了2014年的1170万。

People could then pass along this misinformation, pushing the numbers further away from the truth.

然后，人们可能会传播这种错误信息，使数字与真相进一步背离。

“People can self-generate their own misinformation. It doesn’t all come from external sources,” Jason Coronel, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at the Ohio State University, said in a statement.

“人们可以自己制造错误信息。”研究报告的主要作者、俄亥俄州立大学(Ohio State University)传播学助理教授杰森·科罗内尔(Jason Coronel)在一份声明中说。

Coronel conducted the study with two doctoral students from the university and it was published online in the journal Human Communication Research.

Coronel和来自该大学的两名博士生一起进行了这项研究，研究结果发表在《人类交流研究》杂志的网络版上。

They said they conducted two separate experiments to measure how users responded regarding societal issues that involved numerical information.

他们说，他们进行了两个独立的实验，以衡量用户对涉及数字信息的社会问题的反应。

“We need to realize that internal sources of misinformation can possibly be as significant as or more significant than external sources,” said Shannon Poulsen, a doctoral student at the Ohio State University.

“我们需要认识到，错误信息的内部来源可能与外部来源同样重要，甚至更重要，”俄亥俄州立大学(Ohio State University)博士生香农·保尔森(Shannon Poulsen)说。

“We live with our biases all day, but we only come into contact with false information occasionally.”

“我们整天生活在偏见中，但我们只是偶尔接触到虚假信息。”