Hannah Metzler
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hannahmetzler.bsky.social
Hannah Metzler
@hannahmetzler.bsky.social
1.7K followers 300 following 30 posts
Clinical psychologist in training & scientist. Psychology, emotions, social media, misinformation & mental health. #EffectiveAltruism
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hannahmetzler.bsky.social
5/ Only people who had more misperceptions about COVID vaccine safety, etc. (not so many in our sample) got more angry about real news and less angry about false news than other people. They also felt less positive after false news. Just the opposite of the majority in our sample 🤔
Figure showing opposite patterns for anger depending on the number of misperceptions people had before the survey: people with less misperceptions about COVID-19 have lower anger in response to false news, but higher anger in response to real news. The reverse is true for people with more prior misperceptions.
January 17, 2025 at 10:59 AM
hannahmetzler.bsky.social
4/ As it turns out, most people in our sample got angry because they recognized the false news, not because fake news successfully manipulated their anger. They wrote things like “bullshit, nonsense, fake news, shaking my head”.🤬 After real news stories, they felt more positive. 😌
Word cloud with larger font sizes for more commonly occurring words and smaller font size for less commonly occurring words. The most prominent words in the wordcloud are Blödsinn , fake, schwachsinn, wut.
January 17, 2025 at 10:59 AM
hannahmetzler.bsky.social
3/ What about people's emotional reactions to each news story? Both people who were good & bad at telling apart real and false news got angry. (see the U-shape). We tried to figure out WHY.
Four panels representing the association between emotional intensity on the Y-axis and news discernment ability on the x-axis for four emotions: anger, anxiety, joy and sadness. For anger, we see a U-shape curve representing higher discernment at low- and high-levels of news discernment.
January 17, 2025 at 10:59 AM
hannahmetzler.bsky.social
2/ Just as vaccines got introduced in Austria in 2021, we let ~400 people rate their affective state & then real and false (see image) news items about COVID-19. We found no association—stronger emotions before seeing the news were not correlated with worse performance. But…
Screenshot of a news item: Image of a girl and her doll with face masks. Underneath is a false news headline in German that reads, "Kinder erhielten unabsichtlich Corona-Impfung und leiden nun unter massiven Herzproblemen". Subheading: "Wie fatal die Ausweitung der Corona-Impfung auf Jugendliche und auch Kinder ist, zeigt ein aktueller Fall aus den USA" English translation for headline: "Children were unintentionally vaccinated against coronavirus and are now suffering from massive heart problems". English translation for subheading reads, "A recent case from the USA shows just how fatal the expansion of the coronavirus vaccination to adolescents and children is."
January 17, 2025 at 10:59 AM