Discover how age, analytical skills, and ideological leanings impact your ability to detect online misinformation—and why interventions are more critical than ever in today’s polarized digital world. Study: Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors . Image Credit: Marko Aliaksandr Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany, have conducted a meta-analysis to identify key demographic and psychological factors that determine an individual’s susceptibility to online misinformation.
The study, published in the journal PNAS, identifies these factors . Background Receiving and spreading online misinformation can have a range of negative consequences in a person’s life, including the development of biased political perception, vaccine hesitancy, and resistance to climate-friendly behaviors. Nearly five billion people use social media to receive news.
Previous studies examining individuals’ susceptibility to online misinformation have primarily focused on single demographic or psychological factors, often leading to conflicting results. These studies have primarily utilized the well-known news headline paradigm, in which participants evaluate the accuracy of news headlines, i.e.
, headlines potentially accompanied by a byline or an image. In this study, scientists have pooled individual participant data from the news headline paradigm and conducted a systematic meta-analysis using Ba.
