First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news
phys.org
University of Cambridge psychologists have developed the first validated "misinformation susceptibility test": a quick two-minute quiz that gives a solid indication of how vulnerable a person is to being duped by the kind of fabricated news that floods online spaces.

Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a “resilience” ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.

The paper

Edit: the article might be misrepresenting the study and its findings, so it’s worth checking the paper itself. (See @realChem 's comment in the thread).

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    May I be honest? The study is awful. It has two big methodological flaws that stain completely its outcome.

    The first one is the absence of either an “I don’t know” answer, or a sliding scale for sureness of your answer. In large part, misinformation is a result of lack of scepticism - that is, failure at saying “I don’t know this”. And odds are that you’re more likely to spread discourses that you’re sure about, be them misinformation or actual information.

    The second flaw is over-reliance on geographically relevant information. Compare for example the following three questions:

    1. Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality
    2. International Relations Experts and US Public Agree: America Is Less Respected Globally
    3. Attitudes Toward EU Are Largely Positive, Both Within Europe and Outside It

    The likelihood of someone living in Morocco, USA and the EU to be misinformed about #1, #2 and #3 respectively is far lower than the odds of someone living elsewhere. And more than that: due to the first methodological flaw, the study isn’t handling the difference between “misinformed” (someone who gets it wrong) and “uninformed” (someone who doesn’t believe anything in this regard).

    (For me, who don’t live in any of those three: the questions regarding EU are a bit easier to know about, but the other two? Might as well toss a coin.)