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Spotting false news and doubting true news: a systematic review and meta-analysis of news judgements
How good are people at judging the veracity of news? We conducted a systematic literature review and pre-registered meta-analysis of 303 effect sizes from 67 experimental articles evaluating accuracy ratings of true and fact-checked false news (NParticipants = 194,438 from 40 countries across 6 continents). We found that people rated true news as more accurate than false news (Cohen’s d = 1.12 [1.01, 1.22]) and were better at rating false news as false than at rating true news as true (Cohen’s d = 0.32 [0.24, 0.39]). In other words, participants were able to discern true from false news and erred on the side of skepticism rather than credulity. We found no evidence that the political concordance of the news had an effect on discernment, but participants were more skeptical of politically discordant news (Cohen’s d = 0.78 [0.62, 0.94]). These findings lend support to crowdsourced fact-checking initiatives and suggest that, to improve discernment, there is more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of fact-checked false news.
Informational ecosystems partially explain differences in socioenvironmental conceptual associations between U.S. American racial groups
Social groups represent a collective identity defined by a distinct consensus of concepts (e.g., ideas, values, and goals) whose structural relationship varies between groups. Here we set out to measure how a set of inter-concept semantic associations, comprising what we refer to as a concept graph, covaries between established social groups, based on racial identity, and how this effect is mediated by information ecosystems, contextualized as news sources. Group differences among racial identity (278 Black and 294 white Americans) and informational ecosystems (Left- and Right- leaning news sources) are present in subjective judgments of how the meaning of concepts such as healthcare, police, and voting relate to each other. These racial group differences in concept graphs were partially mediated by the bias of news sources that individuals get their information from. This supports the idea of groups being defined by common conceptual semantic relationships that partially arise from shared information ecosystems.
Navigating health communication in China: a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of COVID-19 news from 2020 to 2023
This study delves into the communication of the COVID-19 pandemic in China by examining the representation of the pandemic in Chinese news coverage from January 2020 to March 2023. Analyzing 37,484 news reports from leading English newspapers in China, the study employs a corpus-based Discourse-Historical Approach to uncover how specific lexical and discursive strategies construct representations in the Chinese media. Overall, six major representations have been identified: COVID-19 as a lethal global health crisis, the pandemic as an extensive disaster, China’s response as effective, the pandemic fight as a unifying war, steady Chinese economic recovery, and politicization of the pandemic as unethical. Further analysis connects the representations with the sociopolitical and historical context in China. The findings of the study offer insights that can inform precise and culturally sensitive communication strategies for health professionals.
The evolution of online news headlines
As the written word has moved online, new technological affordances and pressures – such as accelerated cycles of production and consumption – have changed how news headlines are produced and selected. Previous literature has linked certain strategies (e.g., clickbait) and linguistic features (e.g., length, negativity) to the success of text online (e.g., clicks). We tracked changes in the prevalence of those features in a sample of ca. 40 million news headlines across the last two decades from English-language outlets worldwide, focusing on the period in which the headline format adapted to the online context. We drew from a broad set of lexical, syntactic and semantic features from the literature to find the signature of the transition to online formats in the journalistic output of the last two decades. Many – but not all – of these features have become more prevalent over time, such as length and negativity. This systematic shift appeared across news outlets from different countries, political leanings, and of different journalistic quality. This may indicate an adaptation to the new affordances and pressures of the digital, online environment, and raises questions for the design of online environments in the future.
Psychological booster shots targeting memory increase long-term resistance against misinformation
An increasing number of real-world interventions aim to preemptively protect or inoculate people against misinformation. Inoculation research has demonstrated positive effects on misinformation resilience when measured immediately after treatment via messages, games, or videos. However, very little is currently known about their long-term effectiveness and the mechanisms by which such treatment effects decay over time. We start by proposing three possible models on the mechanisms driving resistance to misinformation. We then report five pre-registered longitudinal experiments (Ntotal = 11,759) that investigate the effectiveness of psychological inoculation interventions over time as well as their underlying mechanisms. We find that text-based and video-based inoculation interventions can remain effective for one month—whereas game-based interventions appear to decay more rapidly—and that memory-enhancing booster interventions can enhance the diminishing effects of counter-misinformation interventions. Finally, we propose an integrated memory-motivation model, concluding that misinformation researchers would benefit from integrating knowledge from the cognitive science of memory to design better psychological interventions that can counter misinformation durably over time and at-scale.
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