Disinformation about science can impose enormous economic and public health burdens. A recently proposed strategy to help online users recognise false content is to follow the techniques of professional fact checkers, such as looking for information on other websites (lateral reading) and looking beyond the first results suggested by search engines (click restraint). In two preregistered online experiments (N = 5387), we simulated a social media environment and tested two interventions, one in the form of a pop-up meant to advise participants to follow such techniques, the other based on monetary incentives. We measured participants’ ability to identify whether information was scientifically valid or invalid. Analysis of participants’ search style reveals that both monetary incentives and pop-up increased the use of fact-checking strategies. Monetary incentives were overall effective in increasing accuracy, whereas the pop-up worked when the source of information was unknown. Pop-up and incentives, when used together, produced a cumulative effect on accuracy. We suggest that monetary incentives enhance content relevance, and could be combined with fact-checking techniques to counteract disinformation.
Imposing “sin” taxes has been the preferred way governments tried to discourage the over-consumption of temptation goods for decades. However numerous evidence shows that consumers exhibit behavioral biases which can affect their reaction to taxes. This paper investigates a potential bias and how it affects demand for temptation: financial worries associated with poverty have been shown to shift attention towards pressing needs, often at the expense of forward-looking decisions. In an online experiment with UK participants, we randomly induce financial worries and ask participants to allocate a budget between basic necessities and temptation goods in an experimental market. We randomly impose “taxes” on temptation by increasing its price. We find that, in the absence of any tax, inducing financial worries lowers demand for temptation, effect stronger for lower-income participants. However, when financial concerns are salient, increasing the tax does not lower demand among lower-income participants. While financial worries might protect against over-consumption of temptation in the absence of tax changes, they also might hurt the poor the most when additional taxes are introduced.
Scientific disinformation can impose enormous economic and public health burdens. Several types of interventions have been proposed to prevent the proliferation of false information online, where most of the spreading takes place. A recently proposed strategy to help online users recognise false content is to follow the techniques of professional fact checkers, such as looking for information on other websites (lateral reading) and looking beyond the first results suggested by search engines (click restraint). In two preregistered online experiments (N = 5387), we simulated a social-media environment and set-out two interventions, one in the form of a pop-up meant to induce participants to follow such techniques, the other based on monetary incentive. In Experiment 1, we compared these interventions to a control condition. In Experiment 2 another condition was added to test the joint impact of the pop-up and the monetary incentive. We measured participants' ability to identify whether presented scientific information was scientifically (in)valid. Results revealed that while monetary incentives were overall more effective in increasing accuracy, the pop-up contributed when the post originated from an unknown source (and participants could rely less on prior information). Additional analysis on participants’ search style based on both self-report responses and objectively measured behaviour revealed that the pop-up increased the use of fact-checking strategies, and that these in turn increased accuracy. Study 2 also clarified that the pop-up and the incentive did not interfere with each other, but rather acted complementarily, suggesting that attention and literacy interventions can be designed in synergy.
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