Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin 14195, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin 12489, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Nov 19;121(47):e2409329121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2409329121. Epub 2024 Nov 12.
Nearly five billion people use and receive news through social media and there is widespread concern about the negative consequences of misinformation on social media (e.g., election interference, vaccine hesitancy). Despite a burgeoning body of research on misinformation, it remains largely unclear who is susceptible to misinformation and why. To address this, we conducted a systematic individual participant data meta-analysis covering 256,337 unique choices made by 11,561 US-based participants across 31 experiments. Our meta-analysis reveals the impact of key demographic and psychological factors on online misinformation veracity judgments. We also disentangle the ability to discern between true and false news (discrimination ability) from response bias, that is, the tendency to label news as either true (true-news bias) or false (false-news bias). Across all studies, participants were well above-chance accurate for both true (68.51%) and false (67.24%) news headlines. We find that older age, higher analytical thinking skills, and identifying as a Democrat are associated with higher discrimination ability. Additionally, older age and higher analytical thinking skills are associated with a false-news bias (caution). In contrast, ideological congruency (alignment of participants' ideology with news), motivated reflection (higher analytical thinking skills being associated with a greater congruency effect), and self-reported familiarity with news are associated with a true-news bias (naïvety). We also find that experiments on MTurk show higher discrimination ability than those on Lucid. Displaying sources alongside news headlines is associated with improved discrimination ability, with Republicans benefiting more from source display. Our results provide critical insights that can help inform the design of targeted interventions.
近 50 亿人通过社交媒体获取和接收新闻，人们普遍担心社交媒体上的错误信息会带来负面后果（例如，选举干扰、疫苗犹豫）。尽管关于错误信息的研究层出不穷，但谁容易受到错误信息的影响以及原因是什么，在很大程度上仍不清楚。为了解决这个问题，我们进行了一项系统的个体参与者数据荟萃分析，涵盖了 31 项实验中 11561 名美国参与者的 256337 个独特选择。我们的荟萃分析揭示了关键的人口统计学和心理因素对在线错误信息真实性判断的影响。我们还将辨别真假新闻的能力（辨别能力）与反应偏差（即，将新闻标记为真实的倾向（真实新闻偏差）或虚假的（虚假新闻偏差））区分开来。在所有研究中，参与者对真实（68.51%）和虚假（67.24%）新闻标题的准确性都明显高于随机猜测。我们发现，年龄较大、分析思维能力较高以及自认为是民主党人，与较高的辨别能力有关。此外，年龄较大和分析思维能力较高与虚假新闻偏差（谨慎）有关。相比之下，意识形态一致性（参与者的意识形态与新闻一致）、有动机的思考（分析思维能力较高与更大的一致性效应相关）和自我报告对新闻的熟悉程度与真实新闻偏差（天真）有关。我们还发现，在 MTurk 上进行的实验比在 Lucid 上进行的实验具有更高的辨别能力。在新闻标题旁边显示来源与提高辨别能力有关，共和党人从来源显示中获益更多。我们的研究结果提供了关键的见解，可以帮助设计有针对性的干预措施。
