So you repost or retweet articles without reading them – does that make you an ‘expert’ on a subject? Of course not, but you may think you are, study finds
- If we share articles on social media without reading them, and see our friends do the same, we may think we, and they, are experts on a subject, a study finds
- This ‘expert effect’ impacts behaviour, it shows. Shown an online article about investing, Facebook users who shared it made riskier investment decisions
Have you reposted or retweeted an article on social media without reading it first?
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), in the United States, found that sharing articles on social media, whether we’ve read them or not, can make us think we know more about them than we actually do. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
The researchers’ findings have important implications in a world where much of the information we consume comes to us in the form of a tweet, post or TikTok.
When we share stuff, we are proclaiming, in some ways, that we know about it
“You might be able to say, ‘It doesn’t matter if people think I know about this. I know I really don’t,’” says Ward, an author on the study. “Over time, you might actually come to think that you really do know about this stuff, because you share it online.”