Very happy to share that our work is now published in PNAS! 🎉 It's a systematic look into how demographic and psychological factors are associated with misinformation susceptibility. @arc-mpib.bsky.social

Thread below and can be read in full here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Here is an overview of the results. On top we have discrimination ability. For example, older adults have higher discrimination ability. On the bottom we have response bias, older adults have a false news bias, they tend to be more cautious. 14/n

We also looked at some further meta-questions. Experiments on MTurk have better discrimination ability than on Lucid. And headlines displayed with a source lead to better discrimination ability. 13/n

Our biggest effect is familiarity. If you’ve seen a news headline before, you’re much more likely to treat it as true. 12/n

Partisan bias, aka ideological congruency, is a very reliable effect. People treat ingroup news to be true more often and disregard outgroup news as false more often. This again is worrying. The effect holds across partisan lines and is ready for interventions. 11/n

We find that analytical thinking (CRT) is reliably associated with higher discrimination ability and a false news bias (caution). It’s not yet fully clear what the CRT is measuring, unlocking this would help to build better interventions. 10/n

Confirming a worrying trend in other studies, we find that Democrats show a higher discrimination ability than Republicans, and a false-news bias (caution). Seen in light of polarisation, this hints towards Democrats and Republicans inhabiting different perceptions of truth. 9/n

A null effect of education on discrimination ability. Higher education is also linked with treating news as true more often, a kind of naivety (a small effect). Resonates with research suggesting current educational practices need to better equip people for the digital world. 8/n

Older adults have a higher discrimination ability than younger adults and also a false news bias (they are more cautious). This is quite interesting, especially as older adults are known to share the most misinformation. (Note: each line is a study, split by true and false). 7/n

Here are the results at a glance: For discrimination ability, values greater than 0 indicate higher ability to discern between true and false news. For response bias, values greater than zero suggest a true-news bias, while values less than zero indicate a false-news bias. 6/n

In our individual participant data meta-analysis, we pooled together 256,337 unique choices made by 11,561 participants across 31 experiments. This extensive dataset helped us assess how key demographic and psychological factors impact misinformation veracity judgements. 4/n

Research has often used the now-established news headline paradigm, where people are asked whether they believe a news headline to be true or false. Luckily, this presents us with a unique opportunity for some meta science. 😎 3/n

As we know, misinformation can have negative outcomes. And despite lots of research into it, it’s still unclear why people fall for it. 2/n

Who falls for online misinformation? A meta-analysis on demographic and psychological factors impacting misinformation susceptibility.
Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
My lovely coauthors: @alantump.bsky.social Nina Ehmann, @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, Ralph Hertwig, Anton Gollwitzer, @RalfKurvers 1/n