Teaching Students How to Debunk Myths About Misinformation
Aimed at integrating cutting-edge psychological science into the classroom, columns about teaching Current Directions in Psychological Science offer advice and how-to guidance about teaching a particular area of research or topic in psychological science that has been the focus of an article in the APS journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Each day, we perceive thousands of pieces of information. We read news posts on social media, listen to our friends’ stories, and attend lectures and classes. How much should we worry that misinformation—incorrect or misleading information—permeates the information we ingest, making it impossible to separate fact from fiction? Do our political beliefs make us vulnerable to judgments of misinformation? Or are we immune from partisan bias? Are we correct to think that most people get easily tricked into believing incorrect information?
Related Content: Busting Myths in Psychological Science
Bertram Gawronski, Lea Nahon, and Nyx Ng (2024) have proposed a framework to identify myths about misinformation. They argue that misinformation exists, but people’s beliefs about misinformation rarely resemble reality. One false belief is that people struggle to distinguish between false and accurate information. By contrast, Gawronski and colleagues show that people excel at deciphering fact from fiction. Likewise, people mistakenly believe other misinformation myths, namely that partisan bias does not affect misinformation judgments and that gullibility to false information drives people to believe inaccurate or misleading information. The truth is that people’s political beliefs, whether conservative or liberal, strongly influence their misinformation judgments. Rather than being gullible, people fail to believe accurate information contradicting their prior beliefs.
Related Research Topic: Myths and Misinformation
Instructors can use the following two activities to bring this cutting-edge science into the classroom. Each activity identifies a myth about misinformation and how to debunk it. These activities can be used in face-to-face or online classes.
Activity #1: How well do people tell truth from fiction?
Ask students to estimate people’s ability to decipher accurate news from inaccurate news (1 = not good at all to 5 = extremely good). Tell students that, according to Gawronski and colleagues, many people believe that others are not good at determining the difference between accurate and inaccurate news. Do your students’ ratings match this consensus?
Next, tell students you will show them two accurate and two inaccurate statements. With a partner, their job is to identify the accurate and inaccurate statements. Please encourage students to use all forms of technology to help them find the correct answers.
Statement #1: Vice President Kamala Harris paid $20 million for celebrity endorsements.
Statement #2: Google Search helped voters locate polling stations using county names.
Statement #3: Elon Musk banned Stephen King from X (formerly Twitter).
Statement #4: Federal authorities investigated alleged election-related fraud in Virginia.
Finally, provide students with the correct answers:
FALSE: Statement #1: Vice President Kamala Harris paid $20 million for celebrity endorsements.
This false claim circulated on social media, asserting that Harris’s campaign compensated celebrities like Beyoncé and Oprah for their endorsements. No evidence supports this accusation.
ACCURATE Statement #2: Google Search helped voters locate polling stations using county names.
A Google Search feature caused some confusion on Election Day. When users searched for polling information with terms like “Harris” or “Trump,” only the former returned results because “Harris” is a county name in Texas, while “Trump” isn’t associated with any geographic location. This was a technical quirk, not an intentional bias.
FALSE Statement #3: Elon Musk banned Stephen King from X (formerly Twitter).
A satirical website started this rumor, which quickly spread on social media. However, Stephen King himself debunked the claim by posting on X, confirming his account was never banned.
ACCURATE Statement #4: Federal authorities investigated alleged election-related fraud in Virginia.
An isolated typo on a ballot review screen in Virginia led to concerns, but election officials clarified that it was a harmless error with no impact on vote counts.
How well did your students identify the accurate and false statements? Discussion can center on why people falsely believe others struggle to distinguish between accurate and false information.
Activity #2: Does partisan bias influence misinformation judgments?
Ask students how much people’s political beliefs influence their misinformation judgments (1 = not at all to 5 = extremely). According to Gawronski and colleagues, many believe that partisan bias does not impact how misinformation is judged. How much do your students’ ratings match what Gawronski and colleagues report about partisan bias influencing misinformation judgments?
Next, ask students to judge whether each of the following statements is accurate or false:
Statement #1: Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used campaign funds for luxury vacations.
Statement #2: Republican Governor Ron DeSantis secretly supported vaccine mandates, even though he publicly opposed them.
Statement #3: Democratic President Joe Biden wished to cut Social Security and Medicare.
Statement #4: Ballots supporting Republican President-Elect Donald Trump were deliberately “invisible” to scanning machines during the 2024 election.
Finally, tell students the answers. In this case, all of the statements are false. Which statements did students find easier to judge as misinformation? How did students’ own political beliefs affect their misinformation judgments? Instructors can use this activity to discuss other ways that partisan beliefs affect how we think, feel, and act.
Misinformation surrounds us. However, the current research shows that we have less to fear than we may think. People excel at discerning what is true from what is false. Most people aren’t gullible, naïvely believing anything they are told. Instead, people fail to recognize that partisan bias helps fuel misinformation judgments. Debunking these myths about misinformation is a positive start to making more accurate judgments about the world.
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