Priming critical thinking: Simple interventions limit the influence of fake news about climate change on Facebook

By Lauren Lutzke, Caitlin Drummond, Paul Slovic, Joseph L. Arvai. Global Environmental Change, 2019

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Fake news about climate change refers to fabricated information that mimics the appearance of legitimate reporting but is intended to mislead consumers. In light of concerns about fake news regarding climate change and other topics, researchers and media providers have been searching for ways to limit its spread and influence. This study tested the effect of two simple interventions, both of which primed critical thinking, on individuals’ evaluation of the credibility of real and fake news about climate change on Facebook. Through an online experiment (n = 2,750 participants), participants either read a series of guidelines for evaluating news online, or read and then rated the importance of each guideline; a control group was not exposed to guidelines of any type. We found that participants exposed to both types of guidelines reported a reduced likelihood to trust, like, and share fake news about climate change on Facebook. Importantly, exposure to these guidelines did not diminish individuals’ likelihood to trust, like, or share legitimate climate news. The effect sizes for both types of intervention were small. However, because of the scale and speed at which social media operates, even a small reduction in users’ likelihood to trust, like, and share fake news could be meaningful and impactful.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf2e980885da13adff5e4471d5f2f9146dc333a1

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In Communication

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, background): “…et al. 2020; Pennycook et al. 2020b; Sharma et al. 2020; Roozenbeek et al. 2020b), environmental science (e.g., climate change) (Treen et al. 2020; Lutzke et al. 2019; Lewandowsky 2020; Maertens et al. 2020), etc. Interesting research has been carried out to review and study the fake news issue…”
Prebunking interventions based on the psychological theory of “inoculation” can reduce susceptibility to misinformation across cultures. (2020, background): “Future research may investigate how inoculation interventions can be combined with other interventions to support critical thinking (Lutzke et al., 2019), evaluations of authentic news 2 The game is online and freely available for anyone to play at www.getbadnews.com 3 Please see the Method section…”