Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation

Abstract

Misinformation about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a pressing societal challenge. Across two studies, one preregistered ( n1 = 1771 and n2 = 1777), we assess the efficacy of two ‘prebunking’ interventions aimed at improving people’s ability to spot manipulation techniques commonly used in COVID-19 misinformation across three different languages (English, French and German). We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, (a) increases the perceived manipulativeness of misinformation about COVID-19, (b) improves people’s attitudinal certainty (confidence) in their ability to spot misinformation and (c) reduces self-reported willingness to share misinformation with others. The first two effects remain significant for at least one week after gameplay. We also find that reading real-world infographics from UNESCO improves people’s ability and confidence in spotting COVID-19 misinformation (albeit with descriptively smaller effect sizes than the game). Limitations and implications for fake news interventions are discussed.

How Accurate Are Accuracy-Nudge Interventions? A Preregistered Direct Replication of Pennycook et al. (2020)

“…We found some support for the idea that the nudge effect occurs predominantly for the first several headlines that are shown, although we note that this analysis is merely exploratory (see Analysis S1 for a discussion). We encourage further research into the decay of accuracy nudges and other fake-news interventions (Basol et al, 2021;Maertens et al, 2021). Finally, we discuss a discrepancy between the target study's preregistered hypothesis and the reported results.…”

“…In light of the onslaught of fake news, the demand for evidence-based interventions that could help reduce the spread of misinformation is high, but supply remains relatively low (Van Bavel et al, 2020;-with some notable exceptions (Basol et al, 2021;Guess et al, 2020;Maertens et al, 2021). Recent work has examined how simple interventions that prime (or "nudge") people to think about the accuracy of the information that they see online can reduce the spread of misinformation (Pennycook et al, 2021).…”

The Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST): A psychometrically validated measure of news veracity discernment

“…Accordingly, research on the processes behind, impact of, and interventions against misinformation-which has been around for decades-has surged over the past years (for recent reviews, see Van Bavel, Harris, et al, 2020;van der Linden et al, 2021). Researchers have made progress in designing media and information literacy interventions in the form of educational games (Basol et al, 2021;Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019, "accuracy" primes (Pennycook, Epstein, et al, 2021;Pennycook, McPhetres, et al, 2020), introducing friction (Fazio, 2020), and inoculation messages (Lewandowsky & van der Linden, 2021). Crucially, however, no psychometrically validated measurement instrument currently exists that can provide a reliable measure of misinformation susceptibility or news veracity discernment ability.…”

“…= Go Viral! Balanced Item Set (Basol et al, 2021); MFQ-S = Moral Foundations Questionnaire Short Version (Graham et al, 2011); Numeracy = combination of Schwartz Numeracy Test (Schwartz et al, 1997) and Berlin Numeracy Test (Cokely et al, 2012), SD4 = Short Dark Tetrad (Paulhus et al, 2020); SDO = Social Dominance Orientation (Ho et al, 2015); SINS = the Single-Item Narcissism Scale (Konrath et al, 2014); SISES = Single-Item Self-Esteem Scale (Robins et al, 2001) SIRIS = Single-Item Religious Identification Scale (Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006); SSPC = Short Scale of Political Cynicism (Aichholzer & Kritzinger, 2016).…”

Studying the COVID-19 infodemic at scale

“…While the previous articles took a case-study approach to examine the prevalence and trends of COVID-19 related misinformation on popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and potentially reducing its prevalence by blocking, factchecking, and limiting its spread, the article by Basol et al (2021) took a different approach to understanding and combating health-related misinformation. Based on two user studies, the authors demonstrated how a 5-minute online game can equip social media users with critical information literacy skills to spot misinformation and stop themselves from resharing it.…”