Navigating the COVID-19 infodemic: the influence of metacognitive efficiency on health behaviours and policy attitudes

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic of misinformation and increasing polarization around public health measures, such as social distancing and national lockdowns. In this study, I examined metacognitive efficiency—the extent to which the subjective feeling of knowing predicts the objective accuracy of knowledge—as a tool to understand and measure the assimilation of misleading misinformation in a balanced sample of Great Britain’s population ( N = 1689), surveyed at the end of the third national lockdown. Using a signal-detection theory approach to quantify metacognitive efficiency, I found that at the population level, metacognitive efficiency for COVID-19 knowledge was impaired compared with general knowledge, indicating a worse alignment between confidence levels and the actual ability to discern true and false statements. Crucially, individual differences in metacognitive efficiency related to COVID-19 knowledge predicted health-protective behaviours, vaccination intentions and attitudes towards public health measures, even after accounting for the level of knowledge itself and demographic covariates, such as education, income and political alignment. These results reveal the significant impact of misinformation on public beliefs and suggest that fostering confidence in accurate knowledge should be a key target for science communication efforts aimed at promoting compliance with public health and social measures.

The political (a)symmetry of metacognitive insight into detecting misinformation.

“…The model estimated a 99.9% probability that the average metacognitive efficiency in the study population would lie in a preregistered region of practical equivalence (ROPE) around the theoretically optimal metacognitive efficiency (i.e., M ratio = 1, ROPE = 0.9–1.1; Kruschke, 2018). These results resemble findings from more general knowledge domains such as biology and physics (Hypothesis 1.2; M ratio = 0.99, 95% CI [0.88, 1.16], Fischer et al, 2019; M ratio = 0.98, 95% CI [0.91, 1.05], Lisi, 2023), and stand in contrast to the impaired metacognition found in domains such as climate change ( M ratio = 0.47, 95% CI [0.38, 0.64], Fischer et al, 2019; M ratio = 0.17, 95% CI [0.08, 0.32], Thaller & Brudermann, 2020, values extracted from figures) and COVID-19 ( M ratio = 0.82, 95% CI [0.77, 0.86]; Lisi, 2023).…”

“…The asymmetry in metacognitive insight for discordant statements may help explain metacognitive blind spots in politicized science (e.g., climate change; Fischer et al, 2019, Thaller & Brudermann, 2020and COVID-19;Lisi, 2023), where scientific evidence tends to be at odds…”

“…For a glossary of key terms, see Supplemental TableS1.2 Note that bothFischer et al (2019) andLisi (2023) administered factual knowledge questions devised by the National Science Foundation on scientific facts that were neither controversial nor politicized. Moreover, these studies investigated national samples from Germany(Fischer et al, 2019) and the United Kingdom(Lisi, 2023), where-unlike in the United States-biology and physics tend to not be politicized.3 There is evidence that climate change is politicized across countries including the United States(Kennedy, 2020) and GermanyKinkartz, 2019), and that COVID-19 is politicized in the United States(Hart et al, 2020).…”

“…Metacognitive efficiency is theoretically optimal when people’s levels of knowledge are matched by similar levels of metacognition. An emerging line of research applies metacognitive efficiency to the study of misinformation in politically contested domains (Fischer et al, 2019; Fischer & Said, 2021; Lisi, 2023). However, research that quantifies metacognitive efficiency often relies on a limited number of trials (e.g., Fischer et al, 2019) and may therefore be unable to capture between- and within-subject variability in metacognition (Rausch & Zehetleitner, 2022).…”

“…For some general knowledge domains—such as topics within biology and physics—people’s knowledge and confidence are aligned: Their levels of knowledge are matched by similar levels of metacognition (Fischer et al, 2019; Lisi, 2023). 2 By contrast, in more politicized knowledge domains—such as climate change and COVID-19 3 —people’s confidence does not track the accuracy of their knowledge as well as would be expected based on their knowledge (Fischer et al, 2019; Lisi, 2023; Thaller & Brudermann, 2020), a phenomenon that has been dubbed metacognitive blind spots (Fleming, 2021).…”