How Susceptible Are You to Misinformation? There's a Test You Can Take - Scientifc American [View all]

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A new misinformation quiz shows that, despite the stereotype, younger Americans have a harder time discerning fake headlines, compared with older generations

By Joanna Thompson on July 5, 2023

Many Americans seem to worry that their parents or grandparents will fall for fake news online. But as it turns out, we may be collectively concerned about the wrong generation.

Contrary to popular belief, Gen Zers and millennials could be more susceptible to online misinformation than older adults, according to a poll published online on June 29 by the research agency YouGov. What’s more, people who spend more time online had more difficulty distinguishing between real and fake news headlines. “We saw some results that are different from the ad hoc kinds of tests that [previous] researchers have done,” says Rakoen Maertens, a research psychologist at the University of Cambridge and lead author of a study on the development of the test used in the poll, which was published on June 29 in Behavior Research Methods.

Maertens’s team worked with YouGov to administer a quick online quiz based on the test that the researchers developed, dubbed the “misinformation susceptibility test” (MIST). It represents the first standardized test in psychology for misinformation and was set up in a way that allows researchers to administer it broadly and collect huge amounts of data. To create their test, Maertens and his colleagues carefully selected 10 actual headlines and 10 artificial-intelligence-generated false ones—similar to those you might encounter online—that they then categorized as “real” or “fake.” Test takers were asked to sort the real headlines from the fake news and received a percentage score at the end for each category. Here are a couple of examples of headlines from the test so you can try out your “fake news detector”: “US Support for Legal Marijuana Steady in Past Year,” “Certain Vaccines Are Loaded with Dangerous Chemicals and Toxins” and “Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality.” The answers are at the bottom of this article.

Maertens and his team gave the test to thousands of people across the U.S. and the U.K. in their study, but the YouGov poll was given to 1,516 adults who were all U.S. citizens. On average, in the YouGov poll, U.S. adults correctly categorized about 65 percent of the headlines. However, age seemed to impact accuracy. Only 11 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 correctly classified 17 or more headlines, and 36 percent got no more than 10 correct. That’s compared with 36 percent of the 65-and-older crowd who accurately assessed at least 16 headlines. And only 9 percent in the latter age group got 10 or fewer correct. On average, Americans below age 45 scored 12 out of 20, while their older counterparts scored 15.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-susceptible-are-you-to-fake-news-theres-a-test-for-that/