Training critical thinking in fake news discernment

Abstract

In the information age, misinformation can easily reach thousands of people instantly through the internet and social media. Being able to discern true from false can help people stay vigilant and protect against fake news. There are a number of ways to tackle misinformation, many of which place huge emphasis on the news or news source itself. In the current research, we proposed that evidence evaluation ability under the broad definition of critical thinking is an important factor in combating fake news, because fake news can be considered an alternative source of evidence and information. For Study 1 and Study 2, we administered reflective questions to participants after they read designated articles and tested their fake news discernment ability and sharing intentions in two experiments, while for control groups, they only received general questions asking about feelings. We pre-registered our studies on OSF. Study 1 included a short story and a vaccine-related scientific article with 264 participants; Study 2 included two scientific articles, one on vaccines and one on artificial intelligence with 620 participants. An internal meta-analysis aggregating data from the two experiments showed that our reflective questions could boost fake news discernment ability (cohen’s ds = .133, p = .048, 95% CI [0.001, 0.265]. Most critically, through both manually coded and automated text analysis with participants’ responses to reflective questions, we also found that asking reflective questions increased participants’ analytic scores, and higher analytic scores were correlated with better misinformation discernment ability. Together, results suggest that our reflective questions could have focused attention to evidence while evaluating accuracy and sharing intentions. Our research reveals potential new directions for interventions aimed at improving fake news discernment.