washington establishing the credibility of the source of information can help combat the growing menace of fake news a study has foundmisinformation or fake news is a threat to democratic institutions and false information can have farreaching effects researchers saidthe study published in proceedings of the national academy of sciences provides a roadmap for dealing with fake newspeoples beliefs about the source of information affects how they take in that information even at the level of their automatic responses researchers foundthey also found that new information can modify or even undo existing impressions caused by fake newswe wanted to know whether offering information about the source of news matters for peoples gutlevel automatic reactions said melissa ferguson a professor at cornell university in the usdoes knowing that something is fake have lingering pernicious effects that can later shape and influence our thoughts and behaviour toward the person our studies suggest that establishing credibility for news sources is the right policy to combat fake news ferguson said in a statementresearchers conducted seven experiments with more than 3100 participants to assess how the truth value of new information about others affected both their reported feelings and their gutlevel automatic reactionsthe experiments ranged from using video games and narratives of intergroup conflicts to studies featuring an individual named kevinresearchers used kevin to assess how attitudes toward him changed depending on what information was provided in one experiment kevin was depicted positivelyparticipants were then told something disturbing including that he had been arrested for abusing his wife researchers found that when news about the arrest came from police reports gutlevel attitudes toward kevin immediately became more negativehowever when that information was attributed to a friend of kevins exgirlfriend participants retained their positive attitude toward kevinin other words whether participants thought this new information was true determined even their automatic feelings researchers saidand in a separate experiment this occurred even if participants initially thought the information was true and only later discovered that it was from a questionable source they said ptimhn mhn 05091231 nnnn