But, he's okay risking his kids lives... He's more likely to spread the virus to them than the opposite. Well maybe he's not living with them or coming home to them every night during the pandemic. I guess I don't get this guys tweet.
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But, he's okay risking his kids lives... He's more likely to spread the virus to them than the opposite. Well maybe he's not living with them or coming home to them every night during the pandemic. I guess I don't get this guys tweet.
Misinformation can amplify humanity’s challenges. A salient example is the COVID-19 pandemic. The environment created by the pandemic has bred a multitude of falsehoods even as truth has become a matter of life and death. In this research, we investigated why people believe and spread false (and true) news content about COVID-19.
We found that people often fail to consider the accuracy of content when deciding what to share and that people who are more intuitive or less knowledgeable about science are more likely to believe and share falsehoods.
We also tested an intervention to increase the truthfulness of the content shared on social media. Simply prompting people to think about the accuracy of an unrelated headline improved subsequent choices about what COVID-19 news to share.
Accuracy nudges are straightforward for social media platforms to implement on top of the other approaches they are currently employing. With further optimization, interventions focused on increasing the salience of accuracy on social media could have a positive impact on countering the tide of misinformation.
[OA] Pennycook G, McPhetres J, Zhang Y, Lu JG, Rand DG. Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention. Psychological Science 2020:0956797620939054. SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals
Across two studies with more than 1,700 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not the content is accurate when deciding what to share.
In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they were asked directly about accuracy. Furthermore, greater cognitive reflection and science knowledge were associated with stronger discernment.
In Study 2, we found that a simple accuracy reminder at the beginning of the study (i.e., judging the accuracy of a non-COVID-19-related headline) nearly tripled the level of truth discernment in participants? subsequent sharing intentions.
Our results, which mirror those found previously for political fake news, suggest that nudging people to think about accuracy is a simple way to improve choices about what to share on social media.
We found that people often fail to consider the accuracy of content when deciding what to share and that people who are more intuitive or less knowledgeable about science are more likely to believe and share falsehoods.
We also tested an intervention to increase the truthfulness of the content shared on social media. Simply prompting people to think about the accuracy of an unrelated headline improved subsequent choices about what COVID-19 news to share.
Accuracy nudges are straightforward for social media platforms to implement on top of the other approaches they are currently employing. With further optimization, interventions focused on increasing the salience of accuracy on social media could have a positive impact on countering the tide of misinformation.
[OA] Pennycook G, McPhetres J, Zhang Y, Lu JG, Rand DG. Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention. Psychological Science 2020:0956797620939054. SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals
Across two studies with more than 1,700 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not the content is accurate when deciding what to share.
In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they were asked directly about accuracy. Furthermore, greater cognitive reflection and science knowledge were associated with stronger discernment.
In Study 2, we found that a simple accuracy reminder at the beginning of the study (i.e., judging the accuracy of a non-COVID-19-related headline) nearly tripled the level of truth discernment in participants? subsequent sharing intentions.
Our results, which mirror those found previously for political fake news, suggest that nudging people to think about accuracy is a simple way to improve choices about what to share on social media.
AR: Without a vaccine, how hopeful are you that we’ll get this pandemic under control in the U.S.?
AF: I think we can get it under control. But keeping it under control is going to be the real problem. Because this virus is not like other viruses that we’ve experienced, like the original SARS from 2002. That was a coronavirus. It caused an outbreak, a pandemic — there were 8,000 cases and 800 deaths. So in magnitude alone, you see how different it is from what we’re doing now. But it was not really very well and efficiently transmissible, whereas this virus, to our dismay, is spectacularly efficient in transmitting from person to person. So that makes me skeptical whether we would get permanent, sustained control of this without having a vaccine.
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