Misinformation and disinformation are enormous problems online. To help stop the spread, psychologists are increasingly incorporating debunking and digital literacy into their courses.
From the American Psychological Association
By Stephanie Pappas
January 1, 2022
After Sam Wineburg, PhD, delivers his first lecture on online disinformation to his Stanford University undergrads, the initial response is disengagement—a general vibe, Wineburg said, of “What does this gray-haired guy have to teach me about the internet?”
Then Wineburg, an educational psychologist in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, asks the students to imagine they’re trying to get help for a bullied sibling. He instructs them to type in a string of keywords into Google and click on one of the top results. There, they’ll find a well-formatted page on bullying. There’s a logo, a .org domain name, and an author with an MD. The students concur: The website looks like a legitimate place to figure out how to deal with bullying.
So Wineburg asks the students to open a new tab and tells them to Google the name of the organization that runs the page: the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds). Now the top hits include the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has identified ACPeds as a fringe hate group. Wikipedia is up there, too, providing a dispassionate history: The organization was formed to oppose adoption of children by gay couples and promotes conversion therapy for LGBTQ people. Much of the page on bullying is devoted to insisting that schools should not run anti-bullying programs focused on “special characteristics” that might “tempt” adolescents to “experiment with atypical behaviors.” But the information is formatted and footnoted to look trustworthy.
The exercise is a real-life introduction to the idea that everyone, not just the naive or unsavvy, is vulnerable to disinformation.
“Once a group of smart Stanford undergraduates sees how easily they are taken in, how easily they fall for this stuff, they suddenly perk up and realize they have something to learn,” Wineburg said. “Nobody wants to be an easy mark.”
Wineburg is one of many psychology instructors who explicitly teach their students how to identify misinformation and disinformation and explain the difference between the two. Misinformation is incorrect information spread innocently: The person creating it or sharing it believes it to be true. Disinformation is deliberately false information.
Both pose enormous problems online, and college students are not immune. “The ability to use a device fluently does not mean that you automatically have the sophistication to evaluate the information that the device spews forth,” Wineburg said.
Equal vulnerability
Age doesn’t seem to matter much when it comes to false information, according to some research, which finds that young and old alike are vulnerable to mis- and disinformation. One study by psychologists Jimmeka Guillory Wright, PhD, of Spelman College, and Lisa Geraci, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, found that both younger and older adults have an equally difficult time replacing digested fake news with corrected facts (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol. 17, 2010). Participants read a passage with false information that was later corrected. After the correction, both young and old participants could recite the corrected facts. However, all ages still clung to inferences they’d made using the original incorrect information.
Research led by Stanford History Education Group director Joel Breakstone, PhD, and coauthored by Wineburg found that in a diverse sample of 3,446 high school students from 14 states, most students struggled to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy information online (Educational Researcher, Vol. 50, No. 8, 2021). Only about 3% of students realized, for example, that a website purporting to deliver legitimate information about climate change was run by the fossil fuel industry. More than half believed a misleading video supposedly showing ballot stuffing in a U.S. election. (It was a video from Russia.) The researchers found that the students tended to use ineffective methods for deciding whether to trust an internet source: They put a great deal of trust in .org web addresses, for example, and took “About Us” pages at face value. Less than 10% cross-checked a source’s credentials with a simple web search.
This wasn’t surprising, Wineburg said. Schools don’t generally teach students how to conduct fact checks, despite the fact that teens average 7 to 8 hours a day online (Common Sense Media, 2019). “Why would we expect young people to know how to do something that they weren’t taught to do?” he said.
Fortunately, this sort of instruction melds nicely with the psychology curricula, from Psychology 101 to research methods courses to specialized seminars on cognition and reasoning. “It all comes back to what we know about cognitive biases, so you can connect it to psychology so easily,” said Susan Nolan, PhD, a psychology professor at Seton Hall University and president of APA Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology).
Addressing misinformation
Many students come into psychology courses with preconceived notions about the subject, Nolan said, which makes it easy to work debunking into the curriculum from the get-go. Gregory Feist, PhD, a psychology professor at San Jose State University and coauthor of the textbook Psychology: Perspectives and Connections (McGraw Hill, 2022), says he and his coauthor built the idea of questioning preconceptions into the book’s format by starting each chapter with a quiz on concepts that will come up later. In the developmental chapter, the quiz asks whether giving candy to kids makes them hyperactive. Many people believe sugared-up kids are bound to “bounce off the walls,” even though decades of research finds this is untrue (Wolraich, M. L., et al., JAMA, Vol. 274, No. 20, 1995). The text then debunks the myth and explains how researchers know it’s false. Feist strives to bring a similar approach into class, focusing on teaching students how to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of a study or argument and how to be aware of their own biases.
“The more I’ve been teaching, I realize it’s really about teaching how to think rather than what to think,” Feist said.
In his introductory psychology courses, New York University psychologist Jay Van Bavel, PhD, tries to instill the scientific mindset in his students, including tolerance of uncertainty. “I explain to them that science is a process” of getting closer and closer to truth, said Van Bavel, whose new book The Power of Us (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) covers echo chambers and cognitive biases. “That way, when they open The New York Times and see a scientific study they learned in Intro Psych got challenged or debunked, that doesn’t mean that Intro Psych was baloney or the whole field of psychology was baloney.”
Nolan keeps a running list of psychology-related myths and misinformation related to the subjects she teaches to bring to class. Presenting real-world examples is a common technique among instructors who teach about misinformation and disinformation. Feist asks his students to find a piece of disinformation and write a paper on how they know not to trust it. Lisa Fazio, PhD, of Vanderbilt University, asks students to post examples of misinformation and disinformation in a class Slack channel. At Spelman, Wright has her students track their media consumption throughout the day and assigns them a written reflection on where they get their news, what they believe, and why.
A key lesson to impart is that no one is immune from believing misinformation, Wright said. She shares examples of falling for false information herself and emphasizes that it’s okay to alter one’s beliefs based on new information. “I like to normalize being wrong,” she said.
While a great deal of disinformation and misinformation is political, instructors strive to present examples from across the political spectrum as well as from nonpolitical sources so as not to turn off students who might have strong political beliefs. “One of the challenging things is not being hyperpolitical about it,” Feist said.
Evidence-based strategies
Faculty interested in weaving these lessons into their psychology courses don’t need to build a curriculum in a vacuum. Discussions of the topic can be found on the public Facebook page of Div. 2, and instructors post sample syllabi on the Open Science Framework webpage. (Find Fazio’s syllabus for her course on the science of misinformation online.)
The literature on effective debunking can also be part of a lecture on misinformation. (See “Controlling the Spread of Misinformation” in the March 2021 Monitor.) And some classroom curricula and interventions have been empirically tested. One promising method is teaching “lateral reading,” or the process of leaving an original source and checking for background information about the source elsewhere. In a study of teaching lateral reading in college-level civics courses, educational psychology doctoral student Jessica Brodsky of the City University of New York and colleagues found that students initially rarely did this kind of fact-checking but that teaching the strategies as part of a curriculum increased students’ lateral reading (Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, Vol. 6, No. 23, 2021). Wineburg, Breakstone, and their colleagues have tested teaching lateral reading in asynchronous video courses and found that at pretest, only 3 of the 87 participants used lateral reading, while 67 of the 87 did so post-test (Misinformation Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2021).
Another strategy is to gamify the learning. The online game “Bad News” challenges players to become “fake news tycoons” by using outraged social media posts and emotionally driven headlines to gain influence. The game humorously communicates the strategies that disinformers use with a series of badges players can earn as they build a fake news empire, including awards for impersonation, emotion, polarization, conspiracy, trolling, and discrediting opponents. Research led by University of Cambridge social psychologist Sander van der Linden, PhD, has found that playing “Bad News” helped participants improve at spotting fake news (Journal of Cognition, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2020). The effect of the game fades over time without further intervention but remains strong over a period of at least 3 months if participants are retested on spotting fake headlines (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2021). Similar games, including a pandemic-specific one called “Factitious 2020: Pandemic Edition,” allow students to test their mettle on differentiating the truthful from the untrustworthy.
As creators of disinformation become increasingly savvy and video- and image-manipulation tech improves, the challenge of creating skeptics who aren’t nihilists, as Wright puts it, may become ever larger. More work will be needed on how best to combat sophisticated misinformation both within the education system and outside of it. But as medical misinformation worsens a deadly pandemic and political misinformation destabilizes democracies, psychologists say the classroom is a good place to fight back. “Tackling misinformation is not something we can fix all at once,” Wright said, “but hopefully by increasing awareness we can start to help our students become more aware of their own bias and help them to be able to identify misinformation when they encounter it.”
Read this and other stories at the American Psychological Association