Nasty Peers and Smart Sceptics: The cognitive effects of low-quality discussions in comments sections on social media

Sammanfattning: In the social media world of fake news, filter bubbles, and online bullying, people have a hard time navigating through, and keeping an objective distance to, what is right and wrong. So far, only a few researchers have examined the effects of social media on users' thinking, showing that people adapt to antisocial behaviour or poor writing in comments sections. There is much more to find out about how interactive contexts affect the participants' judgement and rational thinking. By first establishing a framework for what low-quality content on social media might involve, this paper then aims to examine the effects that this content has on users' thinking. Through the research company Novus, a quantitative, questionnaire-based experiment was conducted with 667 respondents across Sweden. The experimental groups were exposed to online discussions on social media and later tested on assimilation and contrasting, confirmation bias and cognitive performance. The results showed that an extremely low-quality discussion triggered contrasting effects in the comments section, while the moderately low-quality discussions triggered assimilation effects. Moreover, the extremely low-quality discussion generated altered performance on the two cognitive tasks, while the moderately low-quality discussions did not. Conclusively, the results indicated that (low-quality) discussions on social media can affect users' thinking.