Partisan Bias in the Identification of Fake News

Pennycook and Rand (2021) argue that lack of cognitive reflection is a major cause of fake-news susceptibility, and that recent evidence contradicts the idea that people fall for fake news because of partisan bias. Although the proposed role of cognitive reflection is consistent with the evidence reviewed by the authors, their dismissal of partisan bias is (a) based on a problematic conceptualization of partisan bias and (b) inconsistent with the evidence reviewed in their own article. A conceptualization of partisan bias that is closer to the phenomenon of interest reveals that it does play a major role in the identification of fake news.