This article about fake news is republished here with permission from The Conversation. This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.
One high-profile theory of why people share fake news says that they aren’t paying sufficient attention. The proposed solution is therefore to nudge people in the right direction. For example, “accuracy primes” – short reminders intended to shift people’s attention towards the accuracy of the news content they come across online – can be built into social media sites.
But does this work? Accuracy primes do not teach people any new skills to help them determine whether a post is real or fake. And there could be other reasons, beyond just a lack of attention, that leads people to share fake news, such as political motivations. Our new research, published in Psychological Science, suggests primes aren’t likely to reduce misinformation by much, in isolation. Our findings offer important insights into how to best combat fake news and misinformation online.
The concept of priming is a more or less unconscious process that works by exposing people to a stimulus (such as asking people to think about money), which then impacts their responses to subsequent stimuli (such as their willingness to endorse free-market capitalism). Over the years, failure to reproduce many types of priming effects has led Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to conclude that “priming is now the posterchild for doubts about the integrity of psychological research”.
The idea of using it to counter misinformation sharing on social media is therefore a good test case to learn more about the robustness of priming research.
We were asked by the Center for Open Science to replicate the results of a recent study to counter COVID-19 misinformation. In this study, two groups of participants were shown 15 real and 15 false headlines about the coronavirus and asked to rate how likely they were to share each headline on social media on a scale from one to six.
Before this task, half of the participants (the treatment group) were shown an unrelated headline, and asked to indicate whether they thought this headline was accurate (the prime). Compared to the control group (which was not shown such a prime), the treatment group had significantly higher “truth discernment” – defined as the willingness to share real headlines rather than false ones. This indicated that the prime worked.
To maximise the chance of a successful replication, we collaborated with the authors on the original study. We first collected a sample large enough to reproduce the original study’s findings. If we didn’t find a significant effect in this first round of data collection, we had to collect another round of data and pool it together with the first round.
Our first replication test was unsuccessful, with no effect of the accuracy prime on subsequent news sharing intentions. This is in line with replication results of other priming research.
For the pooled dataset, which consisted of almost 1,600 participants, we did find a significant effect of the accuracy prime on subsequent news sharing intentions. But this was at about 50% of the original study’s intervention effect. That means that if we picked a person at random from the treatment group, the likelihood that they would have improved news sharing decisions compared to a person from the control group is about 54% – barely above chance. This indicates that the overall effect of accuracy nudges may be small, consistent with previous findings on priming. Of course, if scaled across millions of people on social media, this effect could still be meaningful.