How to be a human lie detector of fake news, according to the latest science

Fake news existed long before the internet.

In an essay on political lying in the early 18th century, the writer Jonathan Swift noted that "Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it." You have to hire a train to pull the truth, explained English pastor Charles Spurgeon in the 19th century, while a lie is "light as a feather ... a breath will carry it."

Clearly, humans have always been susceptible to mistruths. And social networks simply provide another way to propel falsehoods.

MIT researchers recently studied more than...