Young men with passive approach to news tend to believe medical misinformation

True or false?

• “It is safe to take an over-the-counter medicine to help you sleep, even if you are drunk on alcohol.”
• “Driving while high on THC (cannabis) is safe.”
• “Using psychedelics is safe for everyone.”

None of those statements is true. But young men who take a passive approach to news and information—consuming whatever flows over their social media transoms—were likely to believe them in a national survey conducted by Washington State University researchers.

And because young men are also more likely than others to misuse prescription drugs like Adderall or take intoxicants generally, the study suggests that creating gender-specific interventions to improve media literacy are needed.   

That is a key finding from new research published this month in the journal Substance Use & Misuse. The study used a cross-sectional national survey of 1,201 people ages 18-29, looking to evaluate whether those with “News Finds Me” attitudes are more likely to believe incorrect health claims, at a time when dubious medical information is abundant.

“Misinformation was a big problem during Covid and I think it has become a grave public health concern overall,” said Hae Yeon Seo, the lead author on the paper. “I wanted to see how passive information-seeking behavior leads to misinformation beliefs around prescription drug use and how that leads to substance use behavior.”

Seo conducted study as a doctoral student at WSU’s Murrow College of Communications, where she focused on health communications and public health; she has since earned her PhD and taken a position as a post-doctoral research associate at Louisiana State University. Her co-authors included  Erica Austin, professor and founding director of the Murrow Center for Media and Health Promotion Research; Porismita Borah, a professor on the graduate faculty at the Murrow College; and Andrew Sutherland, a PhD student in the college.

As the media landscape has fractured and proliferated, young people are bombarded with information through various social media channels of wide-ranging credibility. Many young people simply take in what they come across in these channels from friends, family, influencers and marketers without seeking out specific, trusted sources of news, while remaining confident that they are well-informed—that the news will find them.

“Individuals who consume information passively tend to be more vulnerable to misinformation because they don’t seek out more facts about the issue they’re interested in,” Seo said.

Seo, who grew up in South Korea and came to the U.S. to earn her doctorate, said she first became interested in the link between misinformation and substance use when she arrived in 2020 to find something she had never encountered: widespread legal use of cannabis, often surrounded by dubious claims about its medical benefits or safety.

 “It was new to me, and I thought it could be very interesting to study that,” she said.

In the most recent study, she and her fellow researchers conducted the national survey between June and August 2023. They looked for associations between a passive information-seeking behaviors and belief in a series of medical myths. The team found a strong association between news-finds-me attitudes and belief in the misinformation—but only among the male participants.

The findings reinforce other research that has shown men tend to rely more on “accidental information exposure” without checking multiple sources, and that women are more likely to be cautious about the quality of information they encounter, according to the paper.

It may also reflect other factors surrounding young men and drug use: they tend to use drugs, alcohol and tobacco more than others, and are more likely to model risky behaviors socially and online. Previous research has established associations between belief in medical misinformation and such substance use.

Seo said that one limitation of the survey is that it examined ideas only among those identifying as male and female. Further studies could examine how the attitudes play out among non-binary people and other demographic populations, she said.

The fact that the association between passive information-gathering and misinformation was so strong with just young men suggests that targeting interventions based on gender differences is worth considering, the paper concludes. Seo said that the key strategies for combatting misinformation involve teaching media literacy and critical thinking skills.