An Eye Tracking Approach to Understanding Misinformation and Correction Strategies on Social Media: The Mediating Role of Attention and Credibility to Reduce HPV Vaccine Misperceptions

ABSTRACT

This study uses an unobtrusive eye tracking approach to examine understudied psychological mechanisms – message attention and credibility – when people are exposed to misinformation and correction on social media. We contrast humor versus non-humor correction strategies that point out rhetorical flaws in misinformation regarding the HPV vaccine, which was selected for its relevance and impact on public health. We randomly assigned participants to one of two experimental conditions: humor correction versus non-humor correction. Our analyses revealed that the humor correction increased attention to the image portion of the correction tweet, and this attention indirectly lowered HPV misperceptions by reducing the credibility of the misinformation tweet. The study also found that the non-humor correction outperformed the humor correction in reducing misperceptions via its higher credibility ratings. Practical implications for correcting misinformation on social media are discussed.

Notes

1. The experiment also included misinformation only condition as control (n = 31), but for the purpose of this study, these participants were excluded because they did not receive any corrections.

2. Our original sample size of N = 92 is substantially higher than the average of 74 participants in communication-relevant eye tracking studies (King et al., 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Department of Communication at George Mason University.