<b>Exploring the Effects of (in)Coherence and Metacognitive Effort on Political Misinformation Detection</b>

<p dir="ltr">Misinformation has become a significant obstacle to political news consumption with affective polarization and ideological division hindering partisan news consumption and communication. Individuals are tending to discredit attitudinally incongruent information and bolster attitudinally congruent (mis)information. This dissertation compares groups who were shown attitudinally congruent misinformation and attitudinally incongruent true information to examine partisan news consumers’ selection, processing, and subsequent political and communicative decisions. In a 2 (source partisanship: liberal or conservative) x 2 (article lean: liberal or conservative) x 2 (misinformation: present or absent) between-subjects experiment, this dissertation analyzed responses from U.S. adults (<i>N</i><i> </i>= 527) recruited through Prolific Academic using the Hayes’ PROCESS macro on SPSS. This dissertation found that the presence of misinformation did not significantly predict the extent to which participants exerted more metacognitive effort about the news story they read. However, partisanship of the source selected and its interaction with the partisan lean of the article presented significantly predicted the amount of metacognitive effort that partisan news consumers exerted. Serial mediation analyses were also conducted to examine the extent to which metacognitive effort predicted public (liking/sharing/commenting about news story online, discussing offline, political participation behaviors on- and offline) and private (information-seeking, information-verifying, reporting news story post online) political and communicative outcomes through agreement with the (mis)information and detection of misinformation. The findings from this dissertation offer insights about partisan differences in processing political news articles, misinformation detection, and the downstream decisions that partisans make when presented with political news that may contain misinformation.</p>