Does Fact-Checking Work? Here’s What the Science Says

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In terms of helping to convince people that information is true and trustworthy, “fact-checking does work”, says Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who acted as an unpaid adviser on Facebook’s fact-checking programme in 2022. “Studies provide very consistent evidence that fact-checking does at least partially reduce misperceptions about false claims.”

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Fact-checking is less effective when an issue is polarized, says Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University in New York City. “If you’re fact-checking something around Brexit in the UK or the election in United States, that’s where fact-checks don’t work very well,” he says. “In part that’s because people who are partisans don’t want to believe things that make their party look bad.”

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“If you wanted to know whether a person is exposed to misinformation online, knowing if they’re politically conservative is your best predictor of that,” says Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who worked on that analysis.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): Scientific American