Reducing Younger and Older Adults’ Engagement with COVID-19 Misinformation: The Effects of Accuracy Nudge and Exogenous Cues

Abstract

COVID-19 misinformation got a lot of engagement on social media, which has been a big threat to public health and international relations. Therefore, this study designed an accuracy nudge intervention to induce people to discern misinformation and adopted exogenous cues to reinforce their discernment ability. The two interventions were expected to reduce people’s engagement in COVID-19 misinformation. To test the hypothesis, 80 younger adults and 80 older adults completed this experiment. As expected, the accuracy nudge motivated people to judge misinformation to a large extent. Most of the participants (91.3%) voluntarily used the accuracy nudge, which also decreased the sharing of misinformation by 62.7%. While the intervention combining the accuracy nudge and exogenous cues did not work better than any single intervention in reducing misinformation engagement. Besides, older adults tend to like or share articles that just rely on their glance at headlines, which may account for their vulnerability to misinformation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 72171030), the second Batch of 2021 MOE of PRC Industry-University Collaborative Education Program (Program No. 202102055009, Kingfar-CES “Human Factors and Ergonomics” Program), and the Graduate Research and Innovation Foundation of Chongqing, China (Grant no. CYB21041).

Notes on contributors

Honglian Xiang

Honglian Xiang is a PhD candidate in the School of Management Science and Real Estate at Chongqing University. Her research focuses on older adults’ vulnerability to misinformation and AI-based interventions to misinformation.

Jia Zhou

Jia Zhou is an associate professor in the School of Management Science and Real Estate at Chongqing University and used to be a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on designing information technology and services for older adults.

Zhuowen Wang

Zhuowen Wang is an MS student in the School of Management Science and Real Estate at Chongqing University and majoring in management science and engineering at Chongqing University. His research focuses on the impact of native advertising on older adults.