Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The proliferation of the capability for producing and distributing deepfake videos threatens the integrity of systems of justice, democratic processes, and the general ability to critically assess evidence. This study sought to identify individual differences that predict one’s ability to detect these forgeries. It was hypothesized that measures of affect detection and political orientation would correlate with performance on a deepfake detection task. Within a sample (N = 173) of college undergraduates and participants from Amazon’s M-turk, affect detection ability was shown to correlate with deepfake detection ability, r(171) = .73, p < .001, and general orientation to the political left was shown to correlate with deepfake detection ability, r(171) = .42, p < .001. The results of this study serve to identify populations who are particularly susceptible to deception via deepfake video and to inform the development of interventions that may help defend against attempts to influence them.