Losing the Plot: Transportation as a Predictor of Engagement with Misinformation

The present study applies the narrative transportation construct, frequently used to explain the persuasive power of storytelling, to assess whether absorption into narratives may contribute to the proliferation of misinformation on social media. This premise was tested in a study wherein 289 participants were randomly assigned to read three out of 96 stories sampled from a corpus of articles from misinformation websites. These sources systematically varied in their level of conspiracy, pseudoscience, and factual reporting. Using a generalized linear mixed model and controlling for various individual- and story-level covariates, the study findings supported the role of transportation as a significant predictor of social media engagement (i.e. liking, commenting, sharing) with articles from misinformation websites. Moreover, transportation predicted engagement assessed using an unobtrusive measure that aggregated data across social media platforms. Altogether, these findings imply that the allure of misinformation can be attributed partly to the same psychological process that causes stories to be persuasive.