Author Name: Akshay Upmanyu, Prof (Dr.) Dhruv Sabharwal Date: 25-11-2025
Abstract
This paper examines how cognitive biases influence sharing behaviour of fake news with a special interest in the mediating influence exerted by emotional response.The study is based on the existing psychological theories and considers four major cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias, availability heuristic, anchoring bias, and overconfidence bias, and their impact on the desire of people to share unchecked information over the Internet.A questionnaire with 18 items was conducted with a sample size of 272 respondents and the data were analysed with SPSS through reliability test, principal component analysis (PCA), descriptive statistical analysis and mediation analysis.In the findings, the respondents show moderate cognitive bias, emotional responsiveness, and fake news sharing behaviour, which indicates that there is a tendency to be misinformed but not overwhelming.The mediation analysis shows that the role of emotional response is central and important in forecasting fake news sharing behaviour.Namely, confirmation bias and overconfidence bias were found to have a full mediation by the emotional response and the implication of this is that the effects of the two on sharing behaviour are mediated by affective reactions.The effects of anchoring bias indicate a direct and indirect impact indicating partial mediation but the availability heuristic does not indicate any significant effect.These findings highlight the role of emotional processing in misinformation dissemination, which means that cognitive biases cannot be solely relied upon to understand fake news sharing behaviour.The research adds to the current body of literature because it includes cognitive and emotional approaches to the issue, providing an in-depth explanation of the misinformation processes.
Keywords – fake news, cognitive, bias, behaviour, digital.
