Thread by @GordPennycook

There has been a surge of behavioral research on misinformation & "fake news". To synthesize things, @DG_Rand & I wrote a systematic review: psyarxiv.com/ar96c

We take a cognitive/social psych perspective, but we tried to cast a wide net for the review. Feedback welcome!

Sorry to those who retweeted an earlier version of this tweet that I deleted because the image preview was too zoomed in

There's too much in the review to cover in a tweet thread, but here are some of the take-aways that we thought to be particularly important...

First: Reasoning (or lack thereof) plays a substantially larger role in truth discernment (believing more true stuff than false stuff) than political concordance. Lots of evidence for this now across multiple studies.

Second, when someone shares something on social media, it does not mean that they believe it... or that they even considered whether it is accurate! People are pretty good at discerning between "real" & "fake" news if asked directly. But, when it comes to sharing... yah not great

Third, given that people may not be thinking enough about whether things are accurate before sharing them, a potential intervention is to prompt/prime/nudge the concept of accuracy. This improves the quality of the news that is shared online!

Fourth, platforms can do more to minimize people's exposure to low-quality news content by using user-ratings of source trustworthiness to inform ranking algorithms. i.e., show people information from the sources they trust, since untrustworthy sources aren't very trusted!

There are, of course, many very important questions that remain! Plus a lot of great research by labs from all around the world that I haven't reviewed in this thread. See the full paper for more: psyarxiv.com/ar96c

A clarification (I shouldn't have used the term "systematic" in the initial tweet). We don't make any such claims in the paper, of course.