Interpersonal factors and mental well-being are associated with accuracy in judging the veracity of political news

More work needs to be done to understand how mental well-being and interpersonal factors are associated with biases in judging the veracity of true and false political information. Three days before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, 477 participants guessed the veracity of true and false political statements. Interpersonal factors (e.g., high prosociality and a need to belong) and mental health risk factors (e.g., high depressive symptoms and low eudaimonic well-being) were highly associated with believing false information. Further, positive well-being was associated with assessing news with a partisan bias. Next, hierarchical regression was used to better understand the combination of factors which best predict accurate judgments. To reduce the chances of overfitting, out-of-sample validation was used. About 40% of the variance for believing false information was explained by high prosociality and low well-being. In addition, well-being mediated the effects of political ideology when assessing the veracity of political information.