How To Think About Whether Misinformation Interventions Work

Guay, Brian; Berinsky, Adam J.; Pennycook, Gordon; Rand, David G.

doi:10.31234/osf.io/gv8qx

Cited by 24 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Specifically, Guay et al 2022 the field (e.g., Brodsky et al, 2021;Wineburg et al, 2022). Outcome measures include assessment scores for demonstrating the skills learned during the intervention (e.g., identifying an information source and assessing its credibility).…”

Section: Overview Of the Evidence Behind The Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toolbox of Interventions Against Online Misinformation

Kozyreva¹,

Lorenz-Spreen²,

Herzog³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. A wide range of individual-focused interventions aimed at reducing harm from online misinformation have been developed in the behavioral and cognitive sciences. We, an international group of 26 experts, introduce and analyze our toolbox of interventions against misinformation, which includes an up-to-date account of the interventions featured in 42 scientific papers. A resource for scientists, policy makers, and the public, the toolbox delivers both a conceptual overview of the breadth of interventions, including their target and scope, and a summary of the empirical evidence supporting the interventions, including the methods and experimental paradigms used to test them. The toolbox covers 10 types of interventions: accuracy prompts, debunking, friction, inoculation, lateral reading, media-literacy tips, rebuttals of science denialism, self-reflection tools, social norms, and warning and fact-checking labels.

show abstract

Section: Overview Of the Evidence Behind The Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toolbox of Interventions Against Online Misinformation

Kozyreva¹,

Lorenz-Spreen²,

Herzog³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The former leads to vaccine refusal, which threatens personal and global health, while the latter leads to vandalization of 5G towers, which is comparably innocuous (Afolabi & Ilesanmi, 2021;Pertwee et al, 2022). Therefore, in our view, any intervention designed to tackle the issue of online misinformation must be assessed both with respect to belief in fake news and belief in true news (see also Guay et al, 2022). However, as will be demonstrated in subsequent sections, this is not a universal opinion in the field of online misinformation research.…”

Section: Intervention Specificitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Gamified Inoculation Interventions Do Not Improve Discrimination Between True and Fake News: Reanalyzing Existing Research With Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis

Modirrousta-Galian¹,

Higham²

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Gamified psychological interventions designed to improve detection of online misinformation are becoming increasingly prevalent. Two of the most notable interventions of this kind are Bad News and Go Viral!. To assess their efficacy, prior research has typically used pre-post designs in which participants rated the reliability or manipulativeness of true and fake news items before and after playing these games, while most of the time also including a control group who played an irrelevant game (i.e., Tetris) or did nothing at all. Mean ratings were then compared between pre-tests and post-tests and/or between the control and experimental conditions. Critically, these prior studies have not separated response bias effects (overall tendency to respond “true” or “fake”) from discrimination (ability to distinguish between true and fake news, commonly dubbed discernment). We reanalyzed the results from five prior studies using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, a method unique to signal detection theory (SDT) that allows for discrimination to be measured free from response bias. Across the studies, when comparable true and fake news items were used, we found that Bad News and Go Viral! did not improve discrimination, but rather elicited more conservative responding (i.e., responding “true” less often). These novel findings suggest that the current gamified psychological interventions designed to improve fake news detection are not as effective as previously thought. They also demonstrate the usefulness of ROC analysis, a largely unexploited method in this setting, for assessing the effectiveness of any intervention designed to improve fake news detection.

show abstract

“…Following Guay et al (2022), we analyze discernment between the sharing of true and false news. They find research designs most convincing when treatment reduces sharing of false information but not true information.…”

Section: Sharing Misinformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We discuss our justification for this and other ethical considerations on Appendix E.15 Guay et al (2022) propose that an appropriate test of interventions to reduce misinformation should include true and false content, and an analysis of the intervention's effects on the identification of both true and false content.16 In the discussion section, we disaggregate the outcome measure by a subjectively coded measure of difficulty to…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing Misinformation in a Polarized Context: Experimental Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

Gottlieb¹,

Adida²,

Moussa³

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Misinformation has deleterious and potentially destabilizing effects on democracy. As a result, scholars and practitioners alike are investigating strategies to reduce the belief in and dissemination of misinformation. A common strategy is a digital literacy intervention to increase individual capacity to identify misinformation online. This, we argue, ignores individual, identity-based motivations to consume biased media. We offer a theoretical framework that highlights the limitations of strategies that ignore individuals' directional motives. We propose three interventions that leverage insights on how social identity shapes behavior, and test each with an information experiment in Côte d’Ivoire, a polarized country. We find that a standard digital literacy intervention fails to curb the belief in and spread of misinformation, while our social-identity based interventions limited both. Our findings confirm that misinformation spreads at least in part because individuals are motivated to consume biased media, and caution against strategies that ignore these directional motives.

show abstract

How To Think About Whether Misinformation Interventions Work

Cited by 24 publications

References 22 publications

Toolbox of Interventions Against Online Misinformation

Toolbox of Interventions Against Online Misinformation

Gamified Inoculation Interventions Do Not Improve Discrimination Between True and Fake News: Reanalyzing Existing Research With Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis

Reducing Misinformation in a Polarized Context: Experimental Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About