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The influence of traits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) on the detection of fake news.

Taylor, J. and Matthews, S., 2020. The influence of traits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) on the detection of fake news. In: HCI International 2020, 20-24 July 2020, Copenhagen (online).

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-60152-2_35

Abstract

It has been suggested that neuro-diverse individuals may be particularly good at detecting online deception (Pick 2019). A small-scale exploratory study was conducted to investigate whether individuals with traits associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were more or less accurate in spotting different types of fake news. A non-clinical sample of university students completed an online identification task, where both fake and real articles items were manipulated in terms of their emotive content. When individuals with low and high scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al. 2001) were compared, there were no significant main effects on detection accuracy. However, there were two significant interactions, indicating an interesting relationship between message emotiveness, ASD and fake news detection. The results contribute to an understanding of how psychological differences, in particular ASD, may affect online judgements and will contribute to a developing body of work relating positive skills of neuro-diverse individuals to the cybersecurity industry.

Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:Autism Spectrum Disorder ; Cybersecurity ; Neuro-diverse ; Fake news
Group:Faculty of Science & Technology
ID Code:34908
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:30 Nov 2020 13:10
Last Modified:14 Mar 2022 14:25

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