Why People Fall For Viral Hoaxes Like The Broomstick Challenge

In a previous story, I explained why the “broomstick challenge” is the latest viral science hoax. It is sitting there in history with the standing egg on the equinox, giant “cloud” generator, and “15 days of darkness” in November hoaxes. One person told me that I was ruining the fun by explaining away the myth that a broom would only stand on a certain day in February. My colleague, meteorologist Brad Panovich in Charlotte, had the best response to that statement. He basically said something to the effect of “I am not ruining the fun, I am just extending it to 365 days.” The reality is that the broomstick will stand on any day of the year. It has more to do with the center of gravity of the broom and how it is made than some celestial intervention. Why do people fall for these viral science hoaxes anyway?

Before answering that question, I must introduce the concept of belief bias. I recently discussed belief bias in another article that explained why some people believe that a cold day refutes climate change. According to the website Yourbias.is, belief bias is the following cognitive bias: “If a conclusion supports your existing beliefs, you'll rationalize anything that supports it.” I saw this on more than a few occasions this week with the “broomstick challenge.” Several people on social media posted comments on my pages saying, “I tried it today, but it didn’t work like it did on the other day.” Inherent to this statement is a belief bias. Though scientific experts like me clearly explained that it will happen on any given day, there was doubt because they couldn’t reproduce it (or didn't want to in order to preserve their belief). Most importantly, the NASA statement or website (whichever it was supposed to be) was always fake.

I want to digress for a moment. In my article debunking the “broomstick challenge,” I wrote, “This seems to be a recurring theme as I have written Forbes pieces in the past debunking social media myths that November would be dark for 15 days or that NASA has a massive cloud generating machine.” In both of these cases as with the “broomstick challenge,” NASA is at the center of the hoaxes. My colleague Professor Tom Gill at the University of Texas - El Paso noticed this too. He tweeted:

One interesting thing though about the Broom Challenge, the "15 days of darkness," & other memes that take off: they're all attributed to NASA, which means that the meme-makers AND the public who perpetuate them have faith, confidence in and high regard for NASA. And that's good!

As a former scientist at NASA, I always found the awe and respect for the space agency to be rather high with the public. I can’t tell you how many times people said things like, “WOW, you work for NASA.” Candidly, it seems to work when people attach NASA to these fake or viral hoaxes. Poor NASA public affairs folks. They probably have a standard memo saying, “Ummm, hellooooo, we didn't say that.”

Enough of the digression, let’s explore some of the reasons that people fall for these things. A 2015 study presented at the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web proposed a model for predicting the spread of misinformation on social media. It found that spreading rate, gullibility, probability to verify a hoax, and that to forget one's current belief are the primary factors but that gullibility and the forgetting probability were most significant. Rheeda Walker, a psychology professor at the University of Houston and author of the forthcoming book, The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health: Navigate an Unequal System, Learn Tools for Emotional Wellness, and Get the Help you Deserve, posted a recent study in the Journal of Personality that explored reasons why people fall for fake news. The 2019 study found that belief in fake news may be related to people’s tendency to overly accept weak claims. Such people, the study found, also tended to overstate their own knowledge.

A 2014 article in the Washington Post also questioned why people keep falling for viral hoaxes. They concluded that people: (1) don’t read the content they are sharing, (2) rarely consider the legitimacy of sources, (3) fall victim to biases (belief or confirmation), (4) assume legitimacy the more times they see it, and (5) confuse satire with fact. I think that all of these are traceable to the “broomstick challenge.” However, I would add a few additional thoughts. I think people just want to have fun and be a part of larger movements, particularly in these very stressful and difficult times with so much negative content on social media. Further, there was a certain scientific curiosity (even though the science was flawed) that could stimulate interest in science or teach people to ask better questions in the future.