Fact-Checking: A Meta-Analysis of What Works and for Whom

By Nathan Walter, Jonathan Cohen, R. Lance Holbert, Yasmin Morag. Political Communication, 2019

555 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite its growing prominence in news coverage and public discourse, there is still considerable ambiguity regarding when and how fact-checking affects beliefs. Informed by theories of motivated reasoning and message design, a meta-analytic review was undertaken to examine the effectiveness of fact-checking in correcting political misinformation (k = 30,N = 20,963). Fact-checking has a significantly positive overall influence on political beliefs (d = 0.29), but the effects gradually weaken when using “truth scales,” refuting only parts of a claim, and fact-checking campaign-related statements. Likewise, the ability to correct political misinformation with fact-checking is substantially attenuated by participants’ preexisting beliefs, ideology, and knowledge. The study concludes with a discussion of the fact-checking literature in light of current gaps and future opportunities.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9f2400fec136897f7b7fe19db32eb3386b35b1b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Brendan Nyhan
2. David G. Rand
3. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
4. Gordon Pennycook
5. Nathan Walter

In Communication

1. Gordon Pennycook
2. David G. Rand
3. Brendan Nyhan
4. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
5. Nathan Walter
6. S. van der Linden
7. J. Roozenbeek
8. Nicholas C. Dias

In Sociology and Political Science

1. David G. Rand
2. Gordon Pennycook
3. Brendan Nyhan
4. Nathan Walter
5. Camille J. Saucier
6. Sapna Suresh
7. John J. Brooks
8. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Citations in the corpus

• Facts and Myths about Misperceptions (2020, background): “…increase the accuracy of people’s beliefs and reduce belief in misperceptions, though these interventions do not fully offset the effect of exposure to misinformation and their effects may be reduced in conflictual political settings (Chan et al. 2017; Walter and Murphy 2018; Walter et al. 2019).”
• The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “Another commonly used approach involves attaching warnings to content that professional fact-checkers have found to be false (reviewed in [80,81]).”
• Evaluating the Impact of Attempts to Correct Health Misinformation on Social Media: A Meta-Analysis (2020, result): “Importantly, the pooled-effect retrieved in this study was comparable with previous meta-analyses that focused on the correction of misinformation in contexts such as crime, politics, and science (Walter et al., 2020; Walter & Murphy, 2018).”
• Beyond (Mis)Representation: Visuals in COVID-19 Misinformation (2020, background): “…information, for example, driven by political strategies [. . .] where the communicator distributes incorrect information to achieve a certain (political) goal” (Hameleers, Powell, et al. 2020: 282– 83)—and misinformation, false or misleading information spread unintentionally (Wardle 2017, para.”