Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA.
Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2022 Feb;6(2):236-243. doi: 10.1038/s41562-021-01278-3. Epub 2022 Feb 3.
Widespread misperceptions about COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus threaten to exacerbate the severity of the pandemic. We conducted preregistered survey experiments in the United States, Great Britain and Canada examining the effectiveness of fact-checks that seek to correct these false or unsupported beliefs. Across three countries with differing levels of political conflict over the pandemic response, we demonstrate that fact-checks reduce targeted misperceptions, especially among the groups who are most vulnerable to these claims, and have minimal spillover effects on the accuracy of related beliefs. However, these reductions in COVID-19 misperception beliefs do not persist over time in panel data even after repeated exposure. These results suggest that fact-checks can successfully change the COVID-19 beliefs of the people who would benefit from them most but that their effects are ephemeral.
关于 COVID-19 和新型冠状病毒的广泛误解可能会加剧大流行的严重程度。我们在美国、英国和加拿大进行了预先注册的调查实验，研究了纠正这些错误或未经证实的信念的事实核查的有效性。在三个对大流行应对措施存在不同程度政治冲突的国家，我们证明事实核查可以减少目标性误解，尤其是在那些最容易受到这些说法影响的群体中，并且对相关信念的准确性几乎没有溢出效应。然而，即使在多次接触后，面板数据也显示，这些 COVID-19 误解信念的减少并不会随着时间的推移而持续。这些结果表明，事实核查可以成功地改变那些最受益于事实核查的人的 COVID-19 信念，但它们的效果是短暂的。
