(Illustration by Eric Nyquist)
With misinformation sweeping through social media, affecting elections, and causing unrest worldwide, are there solutions that could address this problem in different countries?
A group of researchers from academic institutions around the world, as well as at Google, set out to determine what characteristics predict how likely people are to believe untruths online and how to make people more selective about what they trust on the internet.
The study analyzed how likely subjects were to fall for misinformation about COVID-19 in 16 countries: the United Kingdom, Brazil, Italy, South Africa, Australia, the United States, Spain, the Philippines, Argentina, Mexico, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, China, Saudi Arabia, and India.
“In every country, participants with a more analytic cognitive style and stronger accuracy-related motivations were better at discerning truth from falsehood,” the researchers write. “Valuing democracy was also associated with greater truth discernment, whereas endorsement of individual responsibility over government support was negatively associated with truth discernment in most countries.”
The researchers tested several interventions to counteract misinformation. “Subtly prompting people to think about accuracy had a generally positive effect on the veracity of news that people were willing to share across countries, as did minimal digital literacy tips,” they write.
The 2021 study recruited 2,000 subjects in each country, all people who reported having social-media accounts. Each subject was shown 20 news headlines about COVID-19, half of which were true and half false, and then asked either how accurate the headline was or how likely they would be to share the article online. One subset of subjects was shown an unrelated headline first; another group saw a set of four tips on digital literacy that Facebook originally developed.
While individual subjects might have had trouble choosing which headline was true, as a group, they did well on these tests. An aggregation of the ratings of the non-expert participants "was able to differentiate true from false headlines with high accuracy in all countries via the ‘wisdom of crowds,'" the researchers write.
The researchers were interested in misinformation because of the dire public-health consequences of online information that dissuades people from getting COVID vaccines, says coauthor David Rand, a professor of management science and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.
“Our data, along with most other studies, suggests that people are not actually that susceptible to misinformation,” Rand says. “That is, most people disbelieve most false claims. However, just being exposed to false claims can increase their plausibility. So it’s important to reduce their spread.”
In one notable finding, researchers observed similar behaviors around the world across different countries and cultures. “The consistent patterns we observe suggest that the psychological factors underlying the misinformation challenge are similar across different regional settings, and that similar solutions may be broadly effective,” they write. This result was surprising, because the researchers had expected to find more variation in different locations, Rand says.
“In a certain sense, the key finding of this paper is that the psychology of COVID-19 misinformation belief and sharing is pretty similar across the 16 countries we studied. For example, critical thinking and accuracy motivation were consistently associated with less belief in false claims,” he says. “Furthermore, the interventions we tested—shifting users’ attention to accuracy, digital literacy tips, and crowdsourced identification of false claims—were all broadly effective across many countries.”
The paper’s value lies in testing several ways to counter online misinformation around the world, unlike most studies, which look at just one country and one or two interventions, says Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College and popular critic of disinformation and political spin. “Encouragingly, many of these findings generalize beyond the United States, where the evidence base is strongest. It’s an extremely important study; we need many more like it.”
The study points toward universal human reactions to misinformation, which could lead to ways to combat it, says Andrew Guess, an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton.
“This is an important paper that demonstrates conclusively in my mind that the psychological mechanisms underlying belief in and engagement with misinformation on social media are similar around the world,” Guess says. “At the same time, the authors show that some of the most promising responses—accuracy nudges, digital media literacy tips, and crowdsourcing—can be effective cross-nationally, which is good news for platforms looking for scalable solutions.”
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Find the full study: Antonio A. Arechar, Jennifer Allen, Adam J. Berinsky, Rocky Cole, Ziv Epstein, Kiran Garimella, Andrew Gully, Jackson G. Lu, Robert M. Ross, Michael N. Stagnaro, Yunhao Zhang, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand, “Understanding and Combatting Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents,” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 7, September 2023.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.