When people feel angry, they are more likely to spread news from unreliable sources.

A research team led by Xiaozhe Peng of the School of Psychology at Shenzhen University in China has published findings indicating that 'people who experience moral anger are more likely to spread news from unreliable sources.' The study suggests that anger may accelerate people's judgment and make them less likely to pay attention to the reliability of news sources.

Moral anger accelerates misinformation sharing: evidence from experimental manipulations and hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling: Cognition and Emotion: Vol 0, No 0 - Get Access
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2026.2647351

Feeling angry makes people more likely to share news from low-credibility sources
https://www.psypost.org/feeling-angry-makes-people-more-likely-to-share-news-from-low-credibility-sources/

Social media is rife with misinformation and misleading news designed to evoke strong emotions. While previous research has shown that moral outrage is involved in the spread of false claims, how the individual emotions that make up outrage, such as anger and disgust, function has not been fully understood.

Peng and his research team investigated whether emotional responses sometimes take precedence over accuracy of content or reliability of sources when people share news on social media. Peng explained that one of the motivations for this research was his repeated observations of how emotionally charged posts accelerate the spread of misinformation and sometimes increase online aggression.

In the first experiment, 223 participants recruited through a Chinese online platform read 24 news headlines that were fabricated as false information. The headlines were adjusted so that the severity of the moral issues varied from neutral to serious violations, and the reliability of the sources was randomly assigned from 0% to 100%.

Before indicating their willingness to share a headline, participants were guided to one of three conditions: the accuracy of the news, the morality of the event, or to be indifferent. The results showed that, overall, news from reliable sources was more likely to be shared, but headlines containing serious moral violations also increased the willingness to share.

In particular, when participants were encouraged to pay attention to the moral aspects of the news, they were more likely to share headlines that contained serious violations. On the other hand, when participants focused on the content itself, such as accuracy and morality, they relied less on the reliability labels of their sources.

In the second experiment, the difference between moral anger and moral disgust was examined with 116 college students. Participants read 18 false news headlines depicting minor or major moral violations, each presented as originating from either a reliable or unreliable source.

In this experiment, participants were asked to assess their current state of anger, disgust, or neutral attention, and then asked if they would like to share the news. The results showed that participants who were prompted to be aware of their anger were significantly more likely to want to share headlines from unreliable sources compared to those in the disgust or neutral conditions.

On the other hand, participants who were encouraged to be aware of their aversion did not show an increase in willingness to share compared to those in the neutral condition. The research team says this is consistent with a psychological explanation that anger motivates action to confront a problem, while aversion tends to lead to a response of distancing oneself from the object.

The third experiment investigated how anger influences the cognitive processes of shared judgment. Sixty-three college students evaluated 36 mixed truth/false headlines labeled with three levels of source reliability: low, ambiguous, and high. Before evaluating the news, participants wrote about personal memories in which they had felt strong anger. They then answered how likely they were to share each headline, and the research team used a mathematical model called a hierarchical drift diffusion model to analyze the speed of judgment and the amount of psychological evidence needed to decide to share.

The analysis revealed that participants who experienced anger had a lower decision threshold for sharing. In other words, people who were angry tended to make decisions about whether or not to share the headline based on less evidence and in a shorter amount of time.

The important point is that anger did not impair the ability to discern truth from falsehood itself. According to the research team, anger did not change the ability to identify whether information is true or false, but rather lowered the psychological barrier to clicking the share button, leading to faster, less cautious decisions.

However, this study also has limitations. The experiment was conducted in a controlled environment, and what was measured was the intention to share, not actual sharing behavior on social media. Also, the sample was limited to the specific cultural context of China. Since the expression and distinction of emotions may differ across cultures, the research team says that it is necessary to verify in the future whether the same mechanism holds true across countries and platforms.

The research team believes that to curb the spread of misinformation, it's important not only to improve the accuracy of the content, but also to implement interventions that appeal to emotions and judgment processes. For example, they've suggested a mild warning display that encourages users to pause and think before viewing posts that evoke strong anger or indignation.

Peng points out that the problem of misinformation is not simply 'a problem of people believing false information,' but also a problem of emotionally charged communication. He says that moral anger, in particular, is a highly action-oriented emotion that pushes people to express, condemn, and rapidly spread information, and therefore is important in understanding why misleading information spreads so quickly.