Psychologists are taking aim at misinformation with these powerful strategies

[This article is part of the 2023 Trends Report]

Psychologists are ramping up efforts to fight the many-headed Hydra of misinformation, drawing on decades of psychological research to help people think more soundly when presented with information telling them that hurricanes are a scam perpetrated by climate change activists or that Covid-19 vaccines can make you sick with the Covid virus. Included in psychologists’ efforts to expose these and more subtle fabrications are massive online campaigns that teach people how to spot and analyze misinformation, research aimed at finding the most effective anti-misinformation strategies, and efforts to teach kids critical thinking skills so they’re equipped to fend off sketchy information.

“We’ve been pushing, pushing, and pushing,” said University of Cambridge professor Sander van der Linden, PhD, a social psychologist who is running some of the world’s largest anti-misinformation interventions. “And we seem to have some momentum now to change things.”

The work is important for obvious reasons as well as more indirect ones, van der Linden added. “Not only can misinformation lead to direct harm, for example, to people’s physical health or to election outcomes,” he said. “But it can erode our trust in each other, in society, and in our institutions.”

There is strong and growing evidence for why people believe misinformation and resist correcting those views. Reasons include confirmation bias—seeking out information that confirms prior beliefs—and motivated reasoning, that is, “reasoning toward a desired conclusion rather than an accurate one,” explained University of Southern California (USC) professor and educational psychologist Gale M. Sinatra, PhD, coauthor with Barbara K. Hofer, PhD, of Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2021). (Sinatra also chaired an APA task force on climate change whose 2022 report, Addressing the Climate Crisis: An Action Plan for Psychologists (PDF, 2.34MB)opens in new window, suggests multiple ways psychologists can help educate the public in an area dogged by misinformation.)

Research also finds that people believe misinformation because it fits easily into their identity or world view, Sinatra added. “If you’re part of a vaccine-hesitant community, you might go along with those views because you don’t have the time, interest, or ability to evaluate vaccine safety directly,” she said. “So, you just look at your Facebook group and see what they say.” Psychologists also know a great deal about emotional motivators that fuel beliefs in fake news or conspiracy theories, including fear and anger, she noted. In addition, studies show that when people encounter fake news when they’re in a state of heightened emotions—whether positive or negative—they’re more likely to believe it and less able to discern fake from real news (Martel, C., et al., Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, Vol. 5, 2020opens in new window).

In a research summary on the topic, University of Western Australia cognitive psychologist Ullrich K. H. Ecker, PhD, and colleagues also point to studies showing that when people see the same false information multiple times—a phenomenon amplified by social media—the information becomes lodged in and throughout memory and becomes difficult to unseat even when new information is presented. Researchers call this phenomenon the “illusory truth effect” (Nature Reviews Psychology, Vol. 1, 2022opens in new window).

Still other studies find that some people are more susceptible to misinformation than others. These include frequent users of social media, those who are less educated, people less likely to employ reflective thinking and analytical reasoning, and people on the political extremes, especially but not limited to those on the extreme right (see, for example, Scherer, L. D., & Pennycook, G., American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 110, No. S3, 2020opens in new window; Roozenbeek, J., et al., Royal Society Open Science, Vol. 7, 2020opens in new window; and Hopp, T., et al., Human Communication Research, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2020opens in new window).

These and other related findings are informing a wealth of new research and interventions in the area.

Starting in fall 2022, a large group of researchers began testing eight anti-misinformation interventions with 30,000 U.S. adults to ascertain which are most effective and why. Strategies they’re investigating include prebunking (inoculating people against the misinformation “virus” in the first place) and debunking (providing ways to correct misinformation once people have consumed it), as well as accuracy nudges, social norms interventions, warning labels, and other approaches. Each participant in the study is assigned to one of the interventions or to a no-intervention control.

The project, headed by cognitive psychologists Lisa Fazio, PhD, of Vanderbilt University, David G. Rand, PhD, of MIT, and Stephan Lewandowsky, PhD, of the University of Bristol in Bristol, England, has some serious research chops behind it. Eight intervention leads from three countries are overseeing each intervention and deciding how it should be implemented, while additional teams will choose the stimuli to be tested and then program, gather, and analyze the data. Supporting the effort are more than 80 misinformation experts who helped decide which interventions to test and who will provide feedback as the project continues. (The project is funded by the Social Science Research Council’s Mercury Projectopens in new window, a global consortium of researchers dedicated to countering misinformation.)

Besides seeing how each intervention fares in general, the researchers plan additional studies to see which interventions are more effective or less effective with different demographic groups, Fazio noted.

The project also includes two major follow-up activities. One will test the effectiveness of the most successful intervention on YouTube. The second is a tool kit that will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each approach so that social media platforms and civil society groups can choose the approaches that best fit their mission and resources, whether that’s a nonprofit organization focused on increasing youth voting or a website encouraging people to get the Covid vaccine, Fazio explained.

In another recent effort, van der Linden and colleagues have successfully tested a prebunking intervention that they hope to scale up in a big way. They partnered with Google to place short, fun animated videos on YouTube that educate users to spot and analyze five common misinformation techniques, such as spouting deliberate incoherence and scapegoating others. The videos feature humorous examples of these strategies using characters from popular television shows and films like Family Guy and Star Wars. (The videos can be viewed onlineopens in new window).

In an article in Science Advances (Vol. 38, No. 34, 2022)opens in new window, University of Cambridge social psychologist Jon Roozenbeek, PhD, van der Linden, and colleagues shared results involving 6,464 participants randomized to one of the videos or a neutral control video, and 22,632 online users who saw one of the two videos in an actual YouTube ad campaign. Those who watched the experimental videos were significantly better able to recognize manipulation techniques, to discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content, and to share material with greater discrimination than those who didn’t watch them. The effects held up across the political spectrum and with people of varying education levels and personality types.

Eventually, the team hopes to embed these videos into actual ad spaces on YouTube, said van der Linden. “The findings provide proof of concept that the principle of psychological inoculation can readily be scaled across hundreds of millions of users worldwide,” he said. Google seems to agree: In August, Google’s Jigsaw platform rolled out a campaign in Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic to fight misinformation about Ukrainian refugees using the Cambridge team’s methodology.

Other psychologists are taking aim at a root cause of people’s difficulty in fighting misinformation: a lack of sufficient education in science and critical thinking in the first place. “The whole process of science has to be taught better, with a focus on what is evidence, how science knows what it knows, and why it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know,” Sinatra commented.

In one such effort, educational psychologist Doug Lombardi, PhD, who heads the Science Learning Research Group at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, launched a 4-year science-education project in September 2022 with investigators at Maryland and five other sites, including Sinatra at USC and investigators at Temple University, the University of North Georgia, TERC (formerly the Technical Education Research Center), and the Planetary Science Institute. Funded by the National Science Foundation, it’s the third phase of a project that is examining aspects of an instructional strategy called the model-evidence link (MEL) diagram, which is designed to promote students’ ability to critically evaluate alternative explanations and increase their ability to understand complex scientific concepts, Lombardi explained. (See Lombardi, D., et al., Discourse Processes, Vol. 59, Nos. 5–6, 2022opens in new window, for a description of the methodology and results from the first two phases of the project.)

The team will work with some 100 teachers and 1,000 students in middle and high schools in Philadelphia and Georgia to help students learn a critical evaluation method called lateral reading. Instead of opening a single science or social studies article on the computer desktop and reading down the page, students open additional windows and read other material related to the piece that probes the credibility of the article’s author and sources, the soundness of the science promulgated in the article, and whether other reputable scientific organizations agree with the information, for example. Along the way, the team will test the impact of this methodology on students’ understanding of the fundamental scientific, social, and civic phenomena underlying the material they’re reading about.

In another educational effort, Western Kentucky University associate professor Jenni Redifer, PhD, uses debunking strategies to help preservice teachers in her educational psychology classes dismantle discredited beliefs about learning and embrace more empirically supported learning strategies.

Many future teachers enter her classroom believing that everyone has a learning style that suits them best, for example, auditory, kinesthetic, or visual. But research has resoundingly shown that this is not the case—that people learn best using a combination of approaches that best fit the context of the material being taught. What is more, the learning styles myth tends to affect people’s motivation and self-efficacy, because people believe that their style is the only way that they can learn effectively, she said. That said, the older idea still holds considerable sway: In an article in Psychology Learning and Teaching (Vol. 18, No. 3, 2019)opens in new window, Steven R. Wininger, PhD, Redifer, and colleagues found that 80% of the main 20 educator-prep textbooks discussed the learning styles theory. Half defined it as a preference or approach, while the other half defined it as the way an individual is best able to learn.

To combat these beliefs, Redifer uses strategies in which she replaces the misinformation with new, research-backed information and delivers it in a manner that doesn’t threaten or attack students’ identity or worldviews.

“The good news is that you can learn in any style,” she tells students. “So, you don’t have to worry about giving your students a learning styles inventory or having separate lessons for auditory and visual learners.” Students catch on and are better equipped to teach their own students in the future, she said.

Because the field is hot, many other researchers are tackling pieces of the misinformation puzzle as well. As just one example of the work taking place, Fazio and colleagues recently studied an aspect of the “illusory truth effect,” examining in a real-world context how frequency of messaging affects the strength of people’s beliefs.

For 15 consecutive days, 435 participants received five text messages, each containing a different true or false trivia fact. Some of the statements were presented over multiple days while others were shown only once. At the end of the study, participants received a final test asking them to rate the strength of their belief in a given statement. In keeping with previous research, the more often that people received a message, the more likely they were to believe it, the team found (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 151, No. 10, 2022opens in new window).

However, early repetitions had a stronger effect than those that came later, the team also discovered, implying “that initial repetitions are more strongly encoded in memory,” Fazio said. “So, if you can’t employ prebunking strategies, the sooner you can nip a new piece of misinformation in the bud, the better.”

Others are examining more closely who’s more likely to believe misinformation and why. In a paper presented at the 2022 APA Annual Convention and now under review, Victoria Johnson, a doctoral student working with Panayiota Kendeou, PhD, at the University of Minnesota, presented data showing that liberals and conservatives trusted scientific or partisan sources of Covid vaccination claims in different ways depending on their belief systems. In the study, she and colleagues randomly assigned 133 people identifying as liberals and 354 as conservatives to a variety of statements, each purportedly from either a liberal source, a conservative source, or a scientific institution, for example, MSNBC, Fox News, or the World Health Organization.

Liberals whose belief systems included a higher need for evidence tended to trust scientific sources the most, liberal media sources second, and conservative media the least. But liberals who had less of a need for evidence had the same level of trust in all three source types. Meanwhile, conservatives stating a higher need for evidence trusted scientific and conservative sources of information the same, while those requiring less evidence trusted all three sources equally.

“The results show that vaccine mistrust is not a conservative-only issue,” Johnson said. “There are definitely liberals who aren’t considering science above all other sources, as well.” Such findings suggest the need to better understand subgroups of people and how their reactions to misinformation differ, she noted.

Because of misinformation’s many potential harmful effects, psychologists need to keep addressing it from multiple angles, Fazio added.

“Misinformation is a really multifaceted problem,” she said. “But if we make lots of smaller changes—changes by the [social media] platforms, changes to policies, changes to individual behavior, changes in education, changes to the media environment—I think there is room for progress.”