Pausing to consider why a headline is true or false can help reduce the sharing of false news

By Lisa K. Fazio. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2020

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In an online experiment, participants who paused to explain why a headline was true or false indicated that they were less likely to share false information compared to control participants. Their intention to share accurate news stories was unchanged. These results indicate that adding “friction” (i.e., pausing to think) before sharing can improve the quality of information shared on social media.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fec09acfdadc3833caee7c480dda2759caa43e61

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. J. Roozenbeek
2. S. van der Linden
3. David G. Rand
4. Gordon Pennycook

In Sociology and Political Science

1. J. Roozenbeek
2. S. van der Linden
3. David G. Rand
4. Gordon Pennycook
5. Melisa Basol
6. Sabrine Amri
7. Esma Aïmeur
8. Gilles Brassard

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. David G. Rand
2. Gordon Pennycook
3. J. Roozenbeek
4. S. van der Linden

Citations in the corpus

• The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “Furthermore, survey experiments have shown that asking participants to explain how they know whether a headline is true or false before sharing it increases sharing discernment [105], and having participants rate accuracy at the time of encoding protects against familiarity effects [106].”
• Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention (2020, result): “Consistent with recent work on political misinformation (Fazio, 2020; Pennycook et al., 2020), the present results show that simple and subtle reminders about the concept of accuracy may be sufficient to improve people’s sharing decisions regarding information about COVID-19 and therefore improve th”
• Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, background): “…2022; Jones-Jang et al. 2021; Mihai-lidis and Viotty 2017; García et al. 2020) by encouraging people to pause to assess credibility of headlines (Fazio 2020), promote civic online reasoning (McGrew 2020; McGrew et al. 2018) and critical thinking (Lutzke et al. 2019), together with evaluations…”
• Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation (2021, result): “As such, the #ThinkBeforeSharing infographics finding is inconsistent with recent research showing that getting people to pause and think can help reduce sharing of false news online (Fazio, 2020).”