Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Fake news has permeated online media, presenting consumers with the challenge of detecting it. At what age are we capable of undertaking this challenge? And what factors predict success? We explored these questions with elementary-school-aged children (n = 86), who were asked to judge the veracity of ten news stories, five fake and five real. Children also completed a developmental version of the cognitive reflection test (CRT-D; Young & Shtulman, 2020a). As a group, children were at chance at differentiating fake news from real news, and their individual performance did not vary by age or cognitive reflection. Adults (n = 271) given the same materials succeeded at detecting fake news, especially those high in cognitive reflection. These results suggest that children lack the knowledge or skill needed to evaluate news credibility and that cognitive reflection predicts fake news detection only after we have attained some baseline level of information literacy.