{"id":19733,"date":"2021-01-27T06:18:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T00:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=19733"},"modified":"2021-01-26T20:25:31","modified_gmt":"2021-01-26T14:40:31","slug":"to-combat-false-news-correct-after-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/to-combat-false-news-correct-after-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"To combat false news, correct after reading"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Peter Dizikes<\/strong> |<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (MIT News office)–\u00a0The battle to stop false news and online misinformation is not going to end any time soon, but a new finding from MIT scholars may help ease the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an experiment, the researchers discovered that fact-checking labels, when attached to online news headlines, actually work better after people read false headlines, compared to when they precede the headline or accompany it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe found that whether a false claim was corrected before people read it, while they read it, or after they read it influenced the effectiveness of the correction,\u201d says David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study\u2019s results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, the researchers found, when \u201ctrue\u201d and \u201cfalse\u201d labels were shown immediately after participants in the experiment read headlines, it reduced people\u2019s misclassification of those headlines by 25.3 percent. By contrast, there was an 8.6 percent reduction when labels appeared along with the headlines, and a 5.7 percent decrease in misclassification when the correct label appeared beforehand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTiming does matter when delivering fact-checks,\u201d says Nadia M. Brashier, a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoc at Harvard University, and lead author of the paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paper, \u201cTiming Matters When Correcting Fake News<\/a>,\u201d appears this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em>. The authors are Brashier; Rand; Gordon Pennycook, an assistant professor of behavioral science at University of Regina\u2019s Hill\/Levene Schools of Business; and Adam Berinsky, the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To conduct the study, the scholars ran experiments with a total of 2,683 people, who looked at 18 true news headlines from major media sources and 18 false headlines that have been debunked by the fact-checking website snopes.com<\/a>. Treatment groups of participants saw \u201ctrue\u201d and \u201cfalse\u201d tags before, during, or after reading the 36 headlines; a control group did not. All participants rated the headlines for accuracy. One week later, everyone looked at the same headlines, without any fact-check information at all, and again rated the headlines for accuracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The findings confounded the researchers\u2019 expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGoing into the project, I had anticipated it would work best to give the correction beforehand, so that people already knew to disbelieve the false claim when they came into contact with it,\u201d Rand says. \u201cTo my surprise, we actually found the opposite. Debunking the claim after they were exposed to it was the most effective.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But why might his approach \u2014 \u201cdebunking\u201d rather than \u201cprebunking,\u201d as the researchers call it \u2014 get the best results?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scholars write that the results are consistent with a \u201cconcurrent storage hypothesis\u201d of cognition, which proposes that people can retain both false information and corrections in their minds at the same time. It may not be possible to get people to ignore false headlines, but people are willing to update their beliefs about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAllowing people to form their own impressions of news headlines, then providing \u2018true\u2019 or \u2018false\u2019 tags afterward, might act as feedback,\u201d Brashier says. \u201cAnd other research shows that feedback makes correct information \u2018stick.\u2019\u201d Importantly, this suggests that the results might be different if participants did not explicitly rate the accuracy of the headlines when being exposed to them \u2014 for example, if they were just scrolling through their news feeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, Berinsky suggests, the research helps inform tools that social media platforms and other content providers could use, as they look for better methods to label and limit the flow of misinformation online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is no single magic bullet that can cure the problem of misinformation,\u201d says Berinsky, who has long studied political rumors and misinformation. \u201cStudying basic questions in a systematic way is a critical step toward a portfolio of effective solutions. Like David, I was somewhat surprised by our findings, but this finding is an important step forward in helping us combat misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study was made possible through support to the researchers provided by the National Science Foundation, the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative of the Miami Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Reset Project of Luminate, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Google.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The battle to stop false news and online misinformation is not going to end any time soon, but a new finding from MIT scholars may help ease the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19734,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-it","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",900,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press-200x200.jpg",200,200,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press-600x400.jpg",600,400,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press-768x512.jpg",750,500,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press-675x450.jpg",675,450,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",900,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",900,600,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",900,600,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",855,570,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",600,400,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",600,400,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press-760x490.jpg",760,490,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press-550x360.jpg",550,360,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press-95x65.jpg",95,65,true],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",640,427,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/MIT-Timing-Matters-01-press.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["RevoScience"]},"category_info":"IT<\/a> Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}