Reducing Public Persuasion by and Contribution to Fake News: Developing a socio-cognitive model and intervention for persuasion by misinformation

The overarching objective of this research project is to develop an extended inoculation intervention. This intervention will add training in social context and social biases to provide not only an intervention strategy for conferring resistance against persuasion, but also to decrease propensity to redistribute misinformation. This inoculation strategy treatment should: 1) Increase ability to identify misinformation in a social context 2) Decrease likelihood of belief change and 3) Decrease propensity to share misinformation. To successfully develop this intervention, a conceptual socio-cognitive model of persuasion by misinformation will be tested and revised to better understand the interaction between cognition and social influence in a misinformation setting.

10/19-03/20: Exploring the relation between cognition and behaviour related to misinformation
The first phase of the research will be exploratory in nature and will investigate the relationship between judgements, beliefs and behaviour surrounding misinformation. The purpose of this phase is to uncover whether or not ability to recognise deception is linked to characterising information contained in deceptive messages as false, and furthermore, whether this discourages individuals from sharing such messages.

03/20-03/21: Experimental study on the influence of consensus on detection of misinformation
The second phase of the research will investigate the effects of social consensus on ability to detect misinformation using a within-participant design with consensus as the independent variable and detection of misinformation as the dependent variable. Previous research has investigated this using a pre-post design, but to test these effects in a social setting, in which level of social consensus changes depending on the message, a behavioural trial-based study will be developed using Javascript (specifically jsPsych) and run on psiTurk.

03/ 21- 12/21: Testing extrinsic and intrinsic social cues on propensity to share misinformation
The third phase of the research will examine the potential effects of consensus (extrinsic social cue) and need to belong (intrinsic social cue) on likelihood of sharing misinformation. This experiment will use a mixed methods design adapted from Clarkson et al (2013). Participants (N=200) will be recruited on the online platform Prolific Academic and randomly assigned to a social identification condition (identification need: belonging or uniqueness) or a control (no identification manipulation). Participants identification needs will be manipulated following the method by Clarkson et al (2013) using a fictitious personality test. Subsequently participants will be asked to rate their likelihood of sharing a number of real and fictitious news items paired with a consensus manipulation. Here, a fictitious database of 2000+ previous responses in the database will be visible, such that there is either a) High consensus in sharing b) Medium consensus in sharing c) Low consensus in sharing or d) Not enough information available. Finally, participants will complete a survey based on previous research on uses and gratifications theory applied to social media (e.g. Ku, Chu & Tseng, 2013; Whiting & Williams; 2013) to assess social gratification needs.

12/21-08/22: Revision of socio-cognitive model of misinformation and development of social inoculation intervention
The findings obtained in the above studies will guide the final phase of this research project. Here, the proposed model will be revisited based on findings from above studies. The updated model will be used to develop a revised inoculation method which will incorporate training to overcome social effects in the persuasion by misinformation process. This inoculation method will integrate social perspectives and will aim to reduce both reliability judgements, belief change and sharing of misinformation.