Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention

By Gordon Pennycook, J. McPhetres, Yunhao Zhang, Jackson G. Lu, David G. Rand. Psychology Science, 2020

1,527 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Across two studies with more than 1,700 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not the content is accurate when deciding what to share. In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they were asked directly about accuracy. Furthermore, greater cognitive reflection and science knowledge were associated with stronger discernment. In Study 2, we found that a simple accuracy reminder at the beginning of the study (i.e., judging the accuracy of a non-COVID-19-related headline) nearly tripled the level of truth discernment in participants’ subsequent sharing intentions. Our results, which mirror those found previously for political fake news, suggest that nudging people to think about accuracy is a simple way to improve choices about what to share on social media.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bc5facfd49ec7b635f2fe75a817def81cb9a1a24

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Citations in the corpus

Student Attitudes Towards Online Education during the COVID-19 Viral Outbreak of 2020: Distance Learning in a Time of Social Distance (2020, background): “It seems parsimonious that students participating in this survey trusted standard media over social media for accuracy related to COVID-19, as the accuracy of headlines related to COVID-19 on Facebook has only ~ 50% rating by people sharing headlines (Pennycook et al., 2020).”
Functional Fear Predicts Public Health Compliance in the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “In doing so, we acknowledged the partisan nature of some social attitudes toward the virus itself (Pennycook et al. 2020) and governmental responses to the pandemic (see Pepinsky 2020) while contemplating the potential for intuitive moral foundations to overcome these identity-based political…”
Beyond (Mis)Representation: Visuals in COVID-19 Misinformation (2020, background): “…of COVID-19 conspiracy theories (Freeman et al. 2020; Uscinski et al. 2020), the spread of misinformation on social media on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Hollowood and Mostrous 2020), as well as interventions to counteract misinformation on social media (Pennycook et al. 2020).”
Social media and vaccine hesitancy: new updates for the era of COVID-19 and globalized infectious diseases (2020, background): “Networks may not only introduce structural changes but may support end-users to share accurate information.(79) This is demonstrated in a social psychology study on the posting”
Partisan Polarization Is the Primary Psychological Motivation behind Political Fake News Sharing on Twitter (2020, background): “Successfully discerning between fake and real news is difficult, first, because fake news is specifically designed to appear real and, second, because the fast-paced social media platforms deplete attention and cognitive resources (Pennycook et al. 2020).”
Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing (2020, background): “Additionally, giving people a brief “accuracy nudge” in which they are asked about whether a single headline is true can lead to decreased sharing of fake news (Pennycook et al., 2019, 2020).”
The Role of Personality in COVID-19-Related Perceptions, Evaluations, and Behaviors: Findings Across Five Samples, Nine Traits, and 17 Criteria (2021, background): “Next to studies dealing with situational predictors of individuals’ perceptions, evaluations, and behaviors (e.g., Goldberg et al., 2020; Pennycook et al., 2020), studies have indicated that individual differences account for some of the variance in people’s responses to COVID-19 (e.”
Breaking Harmony Square: A game that “inoculates” against political misinformation (2020, methodology): “We therefore chose to focus on addressing the question of whether Harmony Square is effective at reducing susceptibility to political misinformation, rather than truth discernment (Pennycook et al., 2020) but we note that media literacy interventions can affect the rating of both credible and non-cr”
Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, background): “…2020), promote civic online reasoning (McGrew 2020; McGrew et al. 2018) and critical thinking (Lutzke et al. 2019), together with evaluations of credibility indicators (Bhuiyan et al. 2020; Nygren et al. 2019; Shao et al. 2018a; Pennycook et al. 2020a, b; Clayton et al. 2020; Ozturk et al. Fig.”
Information overload and fake news sharing: A transactional stress perspective exploring the mitigating role of consumers’ resilience during COVID-19 (2021, background): “, 2019, 2020a), the outbreak of the 2019 coronavirus has contributed even more to the surrounding hysteria (Pennycook et al., 2020).”