Study finds social media sharing affects news judgment, but a quick exercise reduces the problem.
"When people are consuming news on social media, their inclination to share that news with others interferes with their ability to assess its accuracy, according to a new study co-authored by MIT researchers."
Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT
To stay current about the Covid-19 pandemic, people need to process health information when they read the news. Inevitably, that means people will be exposed to health misinformation, too, in the form of false content, often found online, about the illness.
Now a study co-authored by MIT scholars contains bad news and good news about Covid-19 misinformation - and a new insight that may help reduce the problem.
The bad news is that when people are consuming news on social media, their inclination to share that news with others interferes with their ability to assess its accuracy. The study presented the same false news headlines about Covid-19 to two groups of people: One group was asked if they would share those stories on social media, and the other evaluated their accuracy. The participants were 32.4 percent more likely to say they would share the headlines than they were to say those headlines were accurate.
"There does appear to be a disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions," says MIT professor David Rand, co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. "People are much more discerning when you ask them to judge the accuracy, compared to when you ask them whether they would share something or not."
The good news: A little bit of reflection can go a long way. Participants who were more likely to think critically, or who had more scientific knowledge, were less likely to share misinformation. And when asked directly about accuracy, most participants did reasonably well at telling true news headlines from false ones.
Moreover, the study offers a solution for over-sharing: When participants were asked to rate the accuracy of a single non-Covid-19 story at the start of their news-viewing sessions, the quality of the Covid-19 news they shared increased significantly.
"The idea is, if you nudge them about accuracy at the outset, people are more likely to be thinking about the concept of accuracy when they later choose what to share. So then they take accuracy into account more when they make their sharing decisions," explains Rand, who is the Erwin H. Schell Associate Professor with joint appointments at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
