How Can Psychological Science Help Counter the Spread of Fake News?

Abstract

In recent years, interest in the psychology of fake news has rapidly increased. We outline the various interventions within psychological science aimed at countering the spread of fake news and misinformation online, focusing primarily on corrective (debunking) and pre-emptive (prebunking) approaches. We also offer a research agenda of open questions within the field of psychological science that relate to how and why fake news spreads and how best to counter it: the longevity of intervention effectiveness; the role of sources and source credibility; whether the sharing of fake news is best explained by the motivated cognition or the inattention accounts; and the complexities of developing psychometrically validated instruments to measure how interventions affect susceptibility to fake news at the individual level.

Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing the spread of misinformation

“…Computational modeling, for example using the limited-attention utility model (Pennycook et al, 2021) or drift-diffusion models, could also play an important role in such investigations. Finally, it would be fruitful to explore how accuracy nudges interact with other approaches to fighting misinformation, such as labeling false content (Lewandowsky et al, 2012;Walter et al, 2020;Wittenberg & Berinsky, 2020) or increasing media and digital literacy (Guess et al, 2020;Jones-Jang et al, 2019;Van Der Linden et al, 2021).…”

“…Starting with "fake news" during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (Lazer et al, 2018), and redoubling during the COVID-19 pandemic (Cuan-Baltazar et al, 2020;Loomba et al, 2021;Shahi et al, 2021) and the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election (Chen et al, 2021;Ferrara et al, 2020;Pennycook & Rand, 2021b), there has been widespread concern about the circulation of false and misleading news on social media. In an attempt to address these concerns, a variety of approaches have been proposed to combat the spread of misinformation online (for reviews, see Kozyreva et al, 2020;Pennycook & Rand, 2021a;Van Der Linden et al, 2021).…”

Misinformation: susceptibility, spread, and interventions to immunize the public

“…Other factors such as greater numeracy skills 4 and cognitive and analytic thinking styles 36,40,41 have consistently been revealed to have a negative correlation with misinformation susceptibilityalthough other scholars have identified partisanship as a potential moderating factor [42][43][44] . In fact, these individual differences have given rise to two competing overarching theoretical explanations 45,46 for why people are susceptible to misinformation. The first theory is often referred to as the classical 'inattention' account; the second is often dubbed the 'identity-protective' or 'motivated cognition' account.…”

Nudging Social Media toward Accuracy

“…2 Here we review a burgeoning literature on a relatively new approach to the online misinformation problem that has been gaining traction: accuracy “nudges” (or prompts, or primes) that increase the quality of content that users share on social media. We focus on accuracy nudges because other common types of interventions against misinformation, such as debunking/fact checking or educational approaches that teach people to identify misinformation, are reviewed extensively elsewhere ( Chan et al 2017 ; Kozyreva, Lewandowsky, and Hertwig 2020 ; van der Linden et al 2021 ; Traberg, Roozenbeek, and van der Linden, this volume ). Accuracy nudges also have the advantages of being extremely fast to administer and not requiring foreknowledge of which news stories are accurate versus misleading.…”