Consumers at the Mercy of Agri-food Fake News: A Psychological Identikit

Today, the spread of fake news is putting at risk the classical relationshipthrough which consumers and companies have always dialogued,especially in the food sector, which has been particularly hitby this phenomenon. One of the major problems, indeed, is that itis not clear which are the characteristics leading consumers to believeand spread them. Scholars focused particularly attention on therole of cognitive information processing and how it contributes to thecreation of the fake news. Less attention has been given to the roleof psychological traits that could lead to the believing and spread ofthis information. From these premises, in this contribution we aim atdiscussing results from a research on the Italian population in orderto give a «psychological portrait» of consumers who believe in fakenews, in terms of individual characteristics and consumption orientation.Data were collected with a self-report questionnaire duringthe first three weeks of March 2019. We obtained 1004 valid questionnairesfilled out by a representative sample of the Italian population, aged 18-75 years old, with sex, age, profession, size of the centre,and geographical area extracted by stratified sampling. We useddescriptive and inferential analysis to elaborate the results. This studysuggests that there are significant differences, regarding both psychologicaland consumption characteristics, between the total populationand those who believe in fake news. Believing in fake news, regardingthe food sector, could lead to negative opinion towards certain foods,which could impact on the image and reputation of firms and consequentlyon the marketplace. For this reason, to understand deeperpsychological levers could help in restoring an effective dialogue withconsumers.