misinformation
Definition
Misinformation refers to any information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading, a category broad enough to encompass fake news, pseudoscientific claims, conspiracy theories, and emotionally deceptive content. Its spread is shaped by individual-level factors including political ideology, personality traits such as conscientiousness, and social identity, with extreme partisans accounting for a disproportionate share of false content shared online. Susceptibility also varies with cognitive and epistemic dispositions: believers of implausible claims consistently provide fewer normative justifications when evaluating evidence, relying instead on self-generated reasoning rather than conventional markers of evidence quality. Perceived source credibility complicates responses to misinformation, with effects on cognitive outcomes such as perceived accuracy proving more consistent than effects on behavioral outcomes such as sharing intentions. Translating laboratory interventions into real-world reductions in misinformation belief and sharing remains difficult, with field studies regularly yielding weaker effects than controlled experiments and replicability across cultural contexts remaining limited.
Sources: Pretus et al. (2024), Robson et al. (2024), Mang et al. (2024), Roozenbeek et al. (2024)
Related Terms
- interventions (4 shared articles)
- inoculation (3 shared articles)
- conspiracy theories (3 shared articles)
- fake news (3 shared articles)
- disinformation (2 shared articles)
- persuasion (2 shared articles)
- intellectual humility (2 shared articles)
- resilience (1 shared article)
- content analysis (1 shared article)
- reasoning (1 shared article)
- meta-analysis (1 shared article)
- signal detection theory (1 shared article)
- metacognition (1 shared article)
- conspiracy theory (1 shared article)
- methodological triangulation (1 shared article)
- causal inference (1 shared article)
- effectiveness (1 shared article)
- efficacy (1 shared article)
- implementation science (1 shared article)
- network analysis (1 shared article)
- trust (1 shared article)
- fact-checking (1 shared article)
- crowdsourcing (1 shared article)
- social influence (1 shared article)
- media exposure (1 shared article)
Applications
Misinformation and Intellectual Humility
Intellectual humility, defined as a willingness to acknowledge the limitations of one's views, is associated with lower receptivity to misinformation across beliefs, intentions, and behaviors, with meta-analytic correlations strongest for pseudoscience, particularly anti-vaccination attitudes and COVID-19 claims. Comprehensive measures of intellectual humility that capture metacognitive, relational, and emotional features produce stronger associations with misinformation discernment than narrow measures focused solely on metacognition.
Sources: Bowes & Fazio (2024), Prike et al. (2024)
Misinformation and Inoculation
Inoculation interventions, which forewarning individuals about persuasive manipulation techniques before exposure, significantly reduce the perceived reliability of misinformation and improve veracity discernment, even when social cues such as likes and shares increase the apparent credibility of false content. Inoculation has also proven effective against identity-congruent disinformation, with a preregistered study showing that the intervention reduced susceptibility to pro-Russian disinformation among Germans of Russian descent without significant impairment from Russian social identity.
Sources: Traberg et al. (2024), Ziemer et al. (2024)
Misinformation and Causal Inference
Most research on misinformation relies on randomized laboratory experiments and observational studies that adjust for third variables, an approach that constrains the types of causal questions researchers can credibly address and risks unjustified causal conclusions. Instrumental variable analysis, regression discontinuity design, difference-in-differences, and synthetic control designs offer underutilized alternatives for drawing causal inferences from natural experiments when randomized manipulation is ethically or practically infeasible.
Sources: Tay et al. (2024)
