Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation.

The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. One approach to mitigating the effect of misinformation focuses on individual-level interventions, equipping policymakers and the public with essential tools to curb the spread and influence of falsehoods. Here we introduce a toolbox of individual-level interventions for reducing harm from online misinformation. Comprising an up-to-date account of interventions featured in 81 scientific papers from across the globe, the toolbox provides both a conceptual overview of nine main types of interventions, including their target, scope and examples, and a summary of the empirical evidence supporting the interventions, including the methods and experimental paradigms used to test them. The nine types of interventions covered are accuracy prompts, debunking and rebuttals, friction, inoculation, lateral reading and verification strategies, media-literacy tips, social norms, source-credibility labels, and warning and fact-checking labels.

Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents.

The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions. To that end, we conducted an experiment in 16 countries across 6 continents (N = 34,286; 676,605 observations) to investigate predictors of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19, and interventions to combat the spread of this misinformation. In every country, participants with a more analytic cognitive style and stronger accuracy-related motivations were better at discerning truth from falsehood; valuing democracy was also associated with greater truth discernment, whereas endorsement of individual responsibility over government support was negatively associated with truth discernment in most countries. Subtly prompting people to think about accuracy had a generally positive effect on the veracity of news that people were willing to share across countries, as did minimal digital literacy tips. Finally, aggregating the ratings of our non-expert participants was able to differentiate true from false headlines with high accuracy in all countries via the 'wisdom of crowds'. The consistent patterns we observe suggest that the psychological factors underlying the misinformation challenge are similar across different regional settings, and that similar solutions may be broadly effective.

Quantifying the potential persuasive returns to political microtargeting.

Much concern has been raised about the power of political microtargeting to sway voters' opinions, influence elections, and undermine democracy. Yet little research has directly estimated the persuasive advantage of microtargeting over alternative campaign strategies. Here, we do so using two studies focused on U.S. policy issue advertising. To implement a microtargeting strategy, we combined machine learning with message pretesting to determine which advertisements to show to which individuals to maximize persuasive impact. Using survey experiments, we then compared the performance of this microtargeting strategy against two other messaging strategies. Overall, we estimate that our microtargeting strategy outperformed these strategies by an average of 70% or more in a context where all of the messages aimed to influence the same policy attitude (Study 1). Notably, however, we found no evidence that targeting messages by more than one covariate yielded additional persuasive gains, and the performance advantage of microtargeting was primarily visible for one of the two policy issues under study. Moreover, when microtargeting was used instead to identify which policy attitudes to target with messaging (Study 2), its advantage was more limited. Taken together, these results suggest that the use of microtargeting-combining message pretesting with machine learning-can potentially increase campaigns' persuasive influence and may not require the collection of vast amounts of personal data to uncover complex interactions between audience characteristics and political messaging. However, the extent to which this approach confers a persuasive advantage over alternative strategies likely depends heavily on context.

Partisans' receptivity to persuasive messaging is undiminished by countervailing party leader cues.

It is widely assumed that party identification and loyalty can distort partisans' information processing, diminishing their receptivity to counter-partisan arguments and evidence. Here we empirically evaluate this assumption. We test whether American partisans' receptivity to arguments and evidence is diminished by countervailing cues from in-party leaders (Donald Trump or Joe Biden), using a survey experiment with 24 contemporary policy issues and 48 persuasive messages containing arguments and evidence (N = 4,531; 22,499 observations). We find that, while in-party leader cues influenced partisans' attitudes, often more strongly than the persuasive messages, there was no evidence that the cues meaningfully diminished partisans' receptivity to the messages-despite them directly contradicting the messages. Rather, persuasive messages and countervailing leader cues were integrated as independent pieces of information. These results generalized across policy issues, demographic subgroups and cue environments, and challenge existing assumptions about the extent to which party identification and loyalty distort partisans' information processing.

Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not seem to help.

Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed - but largely untested - claim that emotionally provocative headlines are associated with worse ability to identify true versus false headlines. Consistent with this proposal, we found correlational evidence that overall emotional response at the headline level is associated with diminished truth discernment, except for experienced anger which was associated with increased truth discernment. The second set of studies tested a popular emotion regulation intervention where people were asked to apply either emotional suppression or emotion reappraisal techniques when considering the veracity of several headlines. In contrast to the correlation results, we found no evidence that emotion regulation helped people distinguish false from true news headlines.

The (minimal) persuasive advantage of political video over text.

Concerns about video-based political persuasion are prevalent in both popular and academic circles, predicated on the assumption that video is more compelling than text. To date, however, this assumption remains largely untested in the political domain. Here, we provide such a test. We begin by drawing a theoretical distinction between two dimensions for which video might be more efficacious than text: 1) one's belief that a depicted event actually occurred and 2) the extent to which one's attitudes and behavior are changed. We test this model across two high-powered survey experiments varying exposure to politically persuasive messaging (total n = 7,609 Americans; 26,584 observations). Respondents were shown a selection of persuasive messages drawn from a diverse sample of 72 clips. For each message, they were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a short video, a detailed transcript of the video, or a control condition. Overall, we find that individuals are more likely to believe an event occurred when it is presented in video versus textual form, but the impact on attitudes and behavioral intentions is much smaller. Importantly, for both dimensions, these effects are highly stable across messages and respondent subgroups. Moreover, when it comes to attitudes and engagement, the difference between the video and text conditions is comparable to, if not smaller than, the difference between the text and control conditions. Taken together, these results call into question widely held assumptions about the unique persuasive power of political video over text.

Timing matters when correcting fake news.

Countering misinformation can reduce belief in the moment, but corrective messages quickly fade from memory. We tested whether the longer-term impact of fact-checks depends on when people receive them. In two experiments (total N = 2,683), participants read true and false headlines taken from social media. In the treatment conditions, "true" and "false" tags appeared before, during, or after participants read each headline. Participants in a control condition received no information about veracity. One week later, participants in all conditions rated the same headlines' accuracy. Providing fact-checks after headlines (debunking) improved subsequent truth discernment more than providing the same information during (labeling) or before (prebunking) exposure. This finding informs the cognitive science of belief revision and has practical implications for social media platform designers.

Stress-testing the affect misattribution procedure: Heterogeneous control of affect misattribution procedure effects under incentives.

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is widely used to measure sensitive attitudes towards classes of stimuli, by estimating the effect that affectively charged prime images have on subsequent judgements of neutral target images. We test its resistance to efforts to conceal one's attitudes, by replicating the standard AMP design while offering small incentives to conceal attitudes towards the prime images. We find that although the average AMP effect remains positive, it decreases significantly in magnitude. Moreover, this reduction in the mean AMP effect under incentives masks large heterogeneity: one subset of individuals continues to experience the 'full' AMP effect, while another reduces their effect to approximately zero. The AMP thus appears to be resistant to efforts to conceal one's attitudes for some individuals but is highly controllable for others. We further find that those individuals with high self-reported effort to avoid the influence of the prime are more often able to eliminate their AMP effect. We conclude by discussing possible mechanisms.

Does truth matter to voters? The effects of correcting political misinformation in an Australian sample.

In the 'post-truth era', political fact-checking has become an issue of considerable significance. A recent study in the context of the 2016 US election found that fact-checks of statements by Donald Trump changed participants' beliefs about those statements-regardless of whether participants supported Trump-but not their feelings towards Trump or voting intentions. However, the study balanced corrections of inaccurate statements with an equal number of affirmations of accurate statements. Therefore, the null effect of fact-checks on participants' voting intentions and feelings may have arisen because of this artificially created balance. Moreover, Trump's statements were not contrasted with statements from an opposing politician, and Trump's perceived veracity was not measured. The present study (N = 370) examined the issue further, manipulating the ratio of corrections to affirmations, and using Australian politicians (and Australian participants) from both sides of the political spectrum. We hypothesized that fact-checks would correct beliefs and that fact-checks would affect voters' support (i.e. voting intentions, feelings and perceptions of veracity), but only when corrections outnumbered affirmations. Both hypotheses were supported, suggesting that a politician's veracity does sometimes matter to voters. The effects of fact-checking were similar on both sides of the political spectrum, suggesting little motivated reasoning in the processing of fact-checks.

Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon.

This study investigated the cognitive processing of true and false political information. Specifically, it examined the impact of source credibility on the assessment of veracity when information comes from a polarizing source (Experiment 1), and effectiveness of explanations when they come from one's own political party or an opposition party (Experiment 2). These experiments were conducted prior to the 2016 Presidential election. Participants rated their belief in factual and incorrect statements that President Trump made on the campaign trail; facts were subsequently affirmed and misinformation retracted. Participants then re-rated their belief immediately or after a delay. Experiment 1 found that (i) if information was attributed to Trump, Republican supporters of Trump believed it more than if it was presented without attribution, whereas the opposite was true for Democrats and (ii) although Trump supporters reduced their belief in misinformation items following a correction, they did not change their voting preferences. Experiment 2 revealed that the explanation's source had relatively little impact, and belief updating was more influenced by perceived credibility of the individual initially purporting the information. These findings suggest that people use political figures as a heuristic to guide evaluation of what is true or false, yet do not necessarily insist on veracity as a prerequisite for supporting political candidates.

Missing voices: polling and health care.

Examining data on the recent health care legislation, we demonstrate that public opinion polls on health care should be treated with caution because of item nonresponse--or "don't know" answers--on survey questions. Far from being the great equalizer, opinion polls can actually misrepresent the attitudes of the population. First, we show that respondents with lower levels of socioeconomic resources are systematically more likely to give a "don't know" response when asked their opinion about health care legislation. Second, these same individuals are more likely to back health care reform. The result is an incomplete portrait of public opinion on the issue of health care in the United States.