Authors: Kevin Aslett, William Godel, Zeve Sanderson, Nate Persily, Jonathan Nagler, Richard Bonneau, and Joshua A. Tucker
In an effort to limit the spread of and belief in fake news, civil society organizations, social media companies, and governments have invested in interventions that provide news consumers with more information about the news they are viewing. Despite broad adoption of these digital media literacy interventions, relatively little is known about the marginal benefit of providing individuals with more information about news articles in real-time. Does it improve their ability to correctly discern the veracity of news? Does it reduce their belief in misinformation? To answer these questions, we used a series of pre-registered experiments in two separate studies to test the marginal effect of three types of information about a news article that have been the subject of broad scientific and popular interest: information in the text of the article, source information, and external information. This produced three important findings. First, we find that access to the full article, rather than just the headline/lede, improves the ability of an individual to correctly discern the veracity of news. Second, source information increases belief in news articles from mainstream sources, but decreases belief in news articles from low-quality sources. This, for the most part, holds when both full articles and headlines/ledes are being evaluated. Finally, external information (in our case, online research through a search engine) increases belief in both true and false/misleading news articles. Worryingly, the effect on false/misleading news is of a similar magnitude to the effect for true news. Our findings not only contribute to the scientific study of the discernment of news veracity, but also provide policy-relevant implications for those building interventions to lower belief in misinformation and increase belief in true information.
@article{2021AslettMarginalInformation, title={Testing The Effect of Information on Discerning the Veracity of News in Real-Time}, author={Aslett, Kevin and Godel, William and Persily, Nate and Bonneau, Richard and Nagler, Jonathan and Tucker, Joshua}, journal={Unpublished Manuscript}, year={2021} }
(1) Open the R Project and make sure the the two files of code are loaded: -Figures_in_Main_Paper.R -Figures_Tables_In_Appendix.R
There are five directories:
(1) code: In the code directory there lies two R files that produce important figures and tables in the main document and the supplementary methods and materials:
(1.1) figures.R: Produces tables and figures for the main paper.
(1.2) tables.R: Produces tables figures and tables for the supplementary materials.
(2) data: Contains all data needed to
(3) figures: All the figures produced by the two R files in the code directory are located here.
(4) tables: All the tables (in .txt files) produced by the two R files in the code directory are located here.