Citation

Roozenbeek J, Freeman ALJ, van der Linden S. Psychol. Sci. 2021; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/09567976211024535

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

As part of the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, the present study consisted of a two-stage replication test of a central finding by Pennycook et al. (2020), namely that asking people to think about the accuracy of a single headline improves "truth discernment" of intentions to share news headlines about COVID-19. The first stage of the replication test (n = 701) was unsuccessful (p =.67). After collecting a second round of data (additional n = 882, pooled N = 1,583), we found a small but significant interaction between treatment condition and truth discernment (uncorrected p =.017; treatment: d = 0.14, control: d = 0.10). As in the target study, perceived headline accuracy correlated with treatment impact, so that treatment-group participants were less willing to share headlines that were perceived as less accurate. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and an unreported change in the hypothesis (but not the analysis plan) from the preregistration in the original study.

Language: en

Keywords

social media; misinformation; open materials; accuracy nudge; fake news; open data; preregistered; priming