## 4 Results
### Individual Decisions and Social Influence  
The aim of Rooms 4 and 5 is to evaluate the impact of the so-called \"Wisdom of the Crowd\" in users' decisions. Room 4 shows actual percentages of users marking every single news as true or false: here we observed the highest average score of 15.31. Room 5 was created for validation purposes, since it displays percentages corresponding to alleged decisions by other users that are actually random. This led to the observation of the lowest average score of 14.43 (see Figure 4). Our hypothesis on this important difference is that random ratings were sometimes highly inconsistent with the content of the news, maybe suggesting that an overwhelming quota of readers had voted some blatantly false news as true, or the contrary. This inconsistency triggered suspicion on the test integrity, which may be the primary cause for the slightly higher abandonment rate we observed in Room 5 (see Table 1). When users did not abandon the test, they still were likely to keep a suspicious attitude. In line with our argument, Figure 6 shows the agreement of users with the ratings they saw for both Room 4 and Room 5. Overall, Room 4 users conform with the social ratings 79.28% of the time, while Room 5 users agreed with the random ratings only 54.66% of the time. This low value is still slightly higher than 50%, i.e., a setting where users conform with the crowd randomly. As a result, there is a clear signal that their judgement was deceived as they performed worse than the users in other rooms. Users that saw the random ratings but did not follow the crowd performed exactly like users in Room 1, that is, our baseline setting. Figure 5: Accuracy for each question, grouped by Room. The source of the news (Room 3) is the feature that can influence users’ judgement the most on the single question, either improving or worsening their scores, especially on questions 1, 4, 5, 8. Figure 6: Agreement of users with the social ratings (Room 4, blue) and random ratings (Room 5, orange). Users conform to social ratings much more than random, inconsistent ones. Random ratings are likely trusted slightly more over true news, where users are probably more hesitant, than over false news. Similarly, social ratings were likely more helpful for false news than true ones. It should also be observed that randomly generated percentages displayed with true news were taken more into account (55.8% of the time) than random percentages shown with false news (53.5% of the times), probably because we selected true news articles that were more deceptive due to their style and borderline content (see Appendix A.3). Room 5 users may have followed the crowd when insecure about the answer and taken a decision independently otherwise, if the percentages contradict their own previous beliefs. On the other hand, users in Room 4 that saw real decisions from other users about true news may have followed the crowd much less than they did when deciding on false news (70.8% against 87.7%). Our hypothesis is that social ratings were perfectly consistent with strong personal opinions over false news, while the signal from other users over true news was a little bit noisy to their judgement. It is worth noting that the majority of respondents answered wrongly to questions 2, 5 and 8 (see Figure 5), thus probably posing a dilemma to other users: whether they should follow the crowd that was consistent and helpful other times, even if they disagree on the decision of the majority. For questions 5 and 8, the agreement with the social ratings are similar to the ones in Room 5, with random ratings (see Figure 6), while the majority's behaviour on question 2 was accepted 64.5% of times, even if the related decisions were wrong. Figure 7 shows the percentage of users that rated news as true in Room 1 vs. Room 4 (top)) and in Room 1 vs. Room 5 (bottom). Users with no additional information tended to rate true news correctly fewer times and rated false news as true more times than users in Room 4.