Lateral reading and monetary incentives to spot disinformation about science

Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation

The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. One approach to mitigating the effect of misinformation focuses on individual-level interventions, equipping policymakers and the public with essential tools to curb the spread and influence of falsehoods. Here we introduce a toolbox of individual-level interventions for reducing harm from online misinformation. Comprising an up-to-date account of interventions featured in 81 scientific papers from across the globe, the toolbox provides both a conceptual overview of nine main types of interventions, including their target, scope and examples, and a summary of the empirical evidence supporting the interventions, including the methods and experimental paradigms used to test them. The nine types of interventions covered are accuracy prompts, debunking and rebuttals, friction, inoculation, lateral reading and verification strategies, media-literacy tips, social norms, source-credibility labels, and warning and fact-checking labels.

Updating the identity-based model of belief: From false belief to the spread of misinformation

The spread of misinformation threatens democratic societies, hampering informed decision-making. Partisan identity biases perceptions of reality, promoting false beliefs. The Identity-based Model of Political Belief explains how social identity shapes information processing and contributes to misinformation. According to this model, social identity goals can override accuracy goals, leading to belief alignment with party members rather than facts. We propose an extended version of this model that incorporates the role of informational context in misinformation belief and sharing. Partisanship involves cognitive and motivational aspects that shape party members' beliefs and actions. This includes whether they seek further evidence, where they seek that evidence, and which sources they trust. Understanding the interplay between social identity and accuracy is crucial in addressing misinformation.

The Online Misinformation Engagement Framework

Research on online misinformation has evolved rapidly, but organizing its results and identifying open research questions is difficult without a systematic approach. We present the Online Misinformation Engagement Framework, which classifies people's engagement with online misinformation into four stages: selecting information sources, choosing what information to consume or ignore, evaluating the accuracy of the information and/or the credibility of the source, and judging whether and how to react to the information (e.g., liking or sharing). We outline entry points for interventions at each stage and pinpoint the two early stages-source and information selection-as relatively neglected processes that should be addressed to further improve people's ability to contend with misinformation.

Teaching lateral reading: Interventions to help people read like fact checkers

People need more support learning to evaluate the credibility of online information. This article reviews recent research on interventions designed to teach lateral reading, the strategy of leaving an unfamiliar website to search for information about a source's credibility via additional sources. Interventions that use diverse designs to teach lateral reading and target participants in elementary school through adulthood have shown evidence of improving participants' digital evaluations. These interventions suggest that targeted and explicit instruction in lateral reading can help people both assess credible information and identify misinformation. Still, much more work is needed in a wider range of contexts to probe the design elements, duration, and teacher education needed to support successful interventions.

Interventions to counter misinformation: Lessons from the Global North and applications to the Global South

We synthesize evidence from 176 experimental estimates of 11 interventions intended to combat misinformation in the Global North and Global South, which we classify as informational, educational, sociopsychological, or institutional. Among these, we find the most consistent positive evidence for two informational interventions in both Global North and Global South contexts: inoculation/prebunking and debunking. In a complementary survey of 138 misinformation scholars and practitioners, we find that experts tend to be most optimistic about interventions that have been least widely studied or that have been shown to be mostly ineffective. We provide a searchable database of misinformation randomized controlled trials and suggest avenues for future research to close the gap between expert opinion and academic research.

Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people's attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring-choosing what to ignore and where to invest one's limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one's digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators' thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today's attention economy.