Mistrustful adults are more vulnerable to vaccine conspiracy theories and less capable of recognising fake news, a new report has found.

The peer-reviewed report — published this week in health journal PLOS Global Public Health — surveyed 705 and 502 adults living in the UK across two studies.

The spread of fake news and “breakdown of collective trust” are “two of the most urgent issues” facing global public health today, according to the University College London team.

In the first study, more gullible or “credulous” adults struggled to tell the difference between real and fake news when presented with 20 “politically neutral” news headlines.

“Each headline was presented as a picture accompanied by a short text and a reference to a source in a social media format,” the report said.

“Epistemic disruption … was found to correlate with belief in conspiracy theories.

Epistemic trust is the willingness to accept and assess new information as trustworthy and relevant.

In the second study, the research team “sought to extend the findings” of the first.

“Childhood adversity” did not appear to have a direct effect on an adult’s ability to recognise fake news, or cause greater “vaccine hesitancy”.

However the research team noted further research was still needed — the study was only based in the UK, and required participants to self-report via online questionnaires, rather than via an interview.

“Individuals with higher credulity and mistrust were more likely to believe COVID-19 conspiracy theories, showed greater scepticism towards official accounts and were less willing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine or to believe in the safety of the vaccine programme,” the report said.

“Thus effective interventions in public health may need to directly tackle and attempt to reverse mistrust and credulity.”

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Health misinformation should be considered a “major global health concern”, according to Charlotte Gupta of the University of Central Queensland’s Healthwise research group.

“Anyone can post anything and, unfortunately, this leads to the spread of information that may not be accurate or evidence-based,” Dr Gupta said.

“Misinformation has definitely been on the rise with the rise of social media and podcasts.

“Not to say that all of the information we see is bad, but it can be hard to determine what is useful and real information and what is not evidence-based.

“The rise of open access papers is also a really great thing for research and for public knowledge, but can mean that people have access to research that can be misinterpreted or overstated to create misinformation.”

Jennifer Byrne, a research scientist and professor of molecular oncology at the University of Sydney, has also worked in investigating the research.

She said the report was limited in that its findings were “built around correlations”, which the research team had acknowledged.

“They’ve looked at a couple of different cohorts in the UK and say they’ve found this characteristic called credulity was associated with an ability to discriminate between fake and real news,” she said.

“As everyone knows, correlation isn’t causation. So it’s kind of hard to say, does being a credulous person actually lead you to be unable to discriminate between fake or real news?

“It does [also] seem like the effect of childhood trauma on your ability to do a particular task at a different point in time could be influenced by just how long you’ve been alive.

“Let’s say you’re 75 and you had a traumatic childhood, but the effect … might be quite different compared with someone who’s 19, who’s basically barely out of that traumatic childhood.

“And the other thing I understand is that childhood trauma also correlates with a whole raft of other things, like disadvantage in life.”

Outrage increases the spread of online misinformation

The UK research follows another report from a team at Princeton University and Northwestern University in the US, which was published late last week.

The report in the peer-reviewed journal Science found people were more likely to share misinformation if it “evoked more angry reactions”.

They were also more likely to share the outrage-provoking content without reading it first.

However, like the UK report, they noted their research was limited by focusing on users in one region — in this case the US — and the nature of the user base on Facebook and Twitter, compared to Reddit or TikTok.

The US team called algorithms an “outstanding challenge” when it comes to managing misinformation.

“Because outrage is associated with increased engagement online, outrage evoking misinformation may be likely to spread farther in part because of the algorithmic amplification of engaging content,” the report said.

“This is important because algorithms may up-rank news articles associated with outrage, even if a user intended to express outrage toward the article for containing misinformation.

“Our findings suggest that misinformation exploits outrage to spread and offers concrete evidence for policy-makers to consider when attempting to craft effective solutions.”