How to tell your intervention is helping people discern true from false news.

This will be a short post as I am rushing to wrap things up before flying out to the American Educational Research Association conference. I'm confident there will be presentations on combatting misinformation there, and I hope the effects of those interventions were analyzed in ways advocated by Guay et al. (2023). Their article helped me understand that it is not enough to assess the efficacy of misinformation interventions by only looking at whether participants do not endorse/share false information. Guay et al. showed how only assessing ratings of false information opens up the possibility that not only does your intervention decrease endorsement of false information, but also true information! That's bad. We want people to be more discerning - meaning interventions should help people recognize false beliefs and rate them lower AND ALSO help people recognize true beliefs and rate them higher. So, measures of discernment are needed, which require that, in the study, participants rate both false and true beliefs. Guay et al. have some helpful Figures to illustrate the issue, advice on how to design studies to produce the necessary data, and guidance on how to analyze those data.

Great article and a quick read. If you're planning a misinformation intervention study, I highly recommend you check it out and plan accordingly.