Psychological Underpinnings of Misinformation Countermeasures

Abstract

There has been substantial scholarly effort to (a) investigate the psychological underpinnings of why individuals believe in misinformation, and (b) develop interventions that hamper their acceptance and spread. However, there is a lack of systematic integration of these two research lines. We conducted a systematic scoping review of empirically tested psychological interventions (N = 176) to counteract misinformation. We developed an intervention map and analyzed boosting, inoculation, identity management, nudging, and fact-checking interventions as well as various subdimensions. We further examined how these interventions are theoretically derived from the two most prominent psychological accounts for misinformation susceptibility: classical and motivated reasoning. We find that the majority of misinformation studies examined fact-checking interventions, are poorly linked to basic psychological theory and not geared towards reducing motivated reasoning. Based on this, we outline future research avenues for effective psychological countermeasures against misinformation.

Don’t Believe Them! Reducing Misinformation Influence Through Source Discreditation

“…When misinformation relates to important domains such as health, politics, or science, it can be harmful at a societal level (Bennett & Livingston, 2018;Bursztyn et al, 2020;Lewandowsky et al, 2017Lewandowsky et al, , 2023Lewandowsky et al, , 2024Loomba et al, 2021;Poland & Spier, 2010;Simonov et al, 2022;Tay et al, 2024;van der Linden et al, 2017). Therefore, finding the most effective strategies to counter misinformation is an important focus of contemporary research (Ecker et al, 2022;Ha et al, 2021;Kozyreva et al, 2022;Ziemer & Rothmund, 2024). One commonly recommended but under-researched approach is to discredit misinformation sources (Lewandowsky et al, 2020;Paynter et al, 2019).…”

Misinformation interventions decay rapidly without an immediate posttest

“…Recent inoculation studies share a similar study design, with a posttest (usually in the form of an item rating task, e.g., rating the perceived reliability of a series of true and false/misleading social media posts) administered immediately after the treatment or control intervention. 1 In fact, the majority of contemporary studies testing the efficacy of misinformation interventions (not just using inoculation) involve immediate posttesting (Johansson et al, 2022;Kozyreva et al, 2024;Ziemer & Rothmund, 2022). And although some longitudinal studies are available (Basol et al, 2021;Brashier et al, 2021;Maertens et al, 2021;Swire et al, 2017), 2 most of these studies have involved participants going through an intervention, then immediately taking a posttest, and then taking another posttest some time after.…”