School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia.
School of Engineering, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia.
Behav Res Methods. 2024 Mar;56(3):2376-2397. doi: 10.3758/s13428-023-02153-x. Epub 2023 Jul 11.
Given the potential negative impact reliance on misinformation can have, substantial effort has gone into understanding the factors that influence misinformation belief and propagation. However, despite the rise of social media often being cited as a fundamental driver of misinformation exposure and false beliefs, how people process misinformation on social media platforms has been under-investigated. This is partially due to a lack of adaptable and ecologically valid social media testing paradigms, resulting in an over-reliance on survey software and questionnaire-based measures. To provide researchers with a flexible tool to investigate the processing and sharing of misinformation on social media, this paper presents The Misinformation Game-an easily adaptable, open-source online testing platform that simulates key characteristics of social media. Researchers can customize posts (e.g., headlines, images), source information (e.g., handles, avatars, credibility), and engagement information (e.g., a post's number of likes and dislikes). The platform allows a range of response options for participants (like, share, dislike, flag) and supports comments. The simulator can also present posts on individual pages or in a scrollable feed, and can provide customized dynamic feedback to participants via changes to their follower count and credibility score, based on how they interact with each post. Notably, no specific programming skills are required to create studies using the simulator. Here, we outline the key features of the simulator and provide a non-technical guide for use by researchers. We also present results from two validation studies. All the source code and instructions are freely available online at https://misinfogame.com .
鉴于对错误信息的依赖可能产生的潜在负面影响，人们付出了大量努力来理解影响错误信息信念和传播的因素。然而，尽管社交媒体的兴起经常被认为是错误信息暴露和虚假信仰的根本驱动因素，但人们如何在社交媒体平台上处理错误信息却还没有得到充分的研究。这部分是由于缺乏适应性强且具有生态有效性的社交媒体测试范式，导致过度依赖调查软件和基于问卷的衡量标准。为了为研究人员提供一个灵活的工具来调查社交媒体上错误信息的处理和共享，本文提出了错误信息游戏——一个易于适应的、开源的在线测试平台，模拟了社交媒体的关键特征。研究人员可以自定义帖子（例如，标题、图片）、来源信息（例如，用户名、头像、可信度）和参与信息（例如，帖子的点赞和不喜欢数量）。该平台允许参与者有一系列的反应选项（例如，点赞、分享、不喜欢、标记），并支持评论。模拟器还可以在单个页面或可滚动的Feed 上呈现帖子，并可以根据参与者与每个帖子的交互方式，通过更改他们的关注者数量和可信度分数，为他们提供定制的动态反馈。值得注意的是，使用模拟器创建研究不需要特定的编程技能。在这里，我们概述了模拟器的关键功能，并为研究人员提供了非技术性指南。我们还展示了两项验证研究的结果。所有的源代码和说明都可以在 https://misinfogame.com 上免费获得。
