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Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 1502–1513 (2023)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 18 July 2023

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Abstract

The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions. To that end, we conducted an experiment in 16 countries across 6 continents (N = 34,286; 676,605 observations) to investigate predictors of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19, and interventions to combat the spread of this misinformation. In every country, participants with a more analytic cognitive style and stronger accuracy-related motivations were better at discerning truth from falsehood; valuing democracy was also associated with greater truth discernment, whereas endorsement of individual responsibility over government support was negatively associated with truth discernment in most countries. Subtly prompting people to think about accuracy had a generally positive effect on the veracity of news that people were willing to share across countries, as did minimal digital literacy tips. Finally, aggregating the ratings of our non-expert participants was able to differentiate true from false headlines with high accuracy in all countries via the ‘wisdom of crowds’. The consistent patterns we observe suggest that the psychological factors underlying the misinformation challenge are similar across different regional settings, and that similar solutions may be broadly effective.

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Fig. 1: Visualization of the four experimental conditions.
Fig. 2: True headlines are believed more than false headlines.
Fig. 3: Consistent cross-cultural evidence that truth discernment is associated with analytic thinking, accuracy motivations and ideology.
Fig. 4: Sharing intentions are less discerning than accuracy judgements, even though people consistently rate accuracy as important when deciding what to share.
Fig. 5: Simple interventions can improve the quality of social media sharing intentions.
Fig. 6: Ratings from even small groups of laypeople can reliably distinguish true from false headlines.

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Data are accessible through this link: https://osf.io/g65qu/.

Code availability

Code and materials are accessible through this link: https://osf.io/g65qu/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from: The MIT Sloan Latin America Office; The Sloan Foundation; The National Science Foundation (2047152); The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative of the Miami Foundation; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; The Reset Initiative of Luminate (part of the Omidyar Network); The John Templeton Foundation; The TDF Foundation; The Canadian Institutes of Health Research; The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; The Australian Research Council (DP180102384); Google. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Aguascalientes, Mexico

    Antonio A. Arechar

  2. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Antonio A. Arechar, Jennifer Allen, Ziv Epstein, Jackson G. Lu, Michael N. Stagnaro, Yunhao Zhang & David G. Rand

  3. Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Antonio A. Arechar

  4. Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Adam J. Berinsky

  5. Google, New York, NY, USA

    Rocky Cole & Andrew Gully

  6. Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Ziv Epstein

  7. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Kiran Garimella

  8. Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Robert M. Ross

  9. Hill/Levene Schools of Business, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Gordon Pennycook

  10. Department of Psychology, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Gordon Pennycook

  11. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    David G. Rand

  12. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    David G. Rand

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Contributions

A.A.A., A.J.B., G.P. and D.G.R. conceived the research; A.A.A., J.A., A.J.B., R.C., Z.E., K.G., A.G., J.G.L., R.M.R., M.N.S., Y.Z., G.P. and D.G.R. designed the study; A.A.A. conducted the study; A.A.A., J.A. and D.G.R. analysed the data; A.A.A., G.P. and D.G.R. wrote the paper with input from J.A., A.J.B., R.C., Z.E., K.G., A.G., J.G.L., R.M.R., M.N.S. and Y.Z.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Gordon Pennycook or David G. Rand.

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Competing interests

A.J.B., G.P. and D.G.R. received research support through gifts from Google. G.P. and D.G.R. received research support through gifts from Facebook. R.C. and A.G. were employees of Google when the work was conducted. A.J.B. and G.P. were Faculty Research Fellows at Google for several months in 2002. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Arechar, A.A., Allen, J., Berinsky, A.J. et al. Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents. Nat Hum Behav 7, 1502–1513 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01641-6

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