Item — HN Reader

Key quote from the article:

To gauge the effects of the game, players were asked to rate the reliability of a series of different headlines and tweets before and after gameplay. They were randomly allocated a mixture of real (“control”) and fake news (“treatment”).

The study, published today in the journal Palgrave Communications, showed the perceived reliability of fake news before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news.

The researchers also found that those who registered as most susceptible to fake news headlines at the outset benefited most from the “inoculation”.

“We find that just fifteen minutes of gameplay has a moderate effect, but a practically meaningful one when scaled across thousands of people worldwide, if we think in terms of building societal resistance to fake news,” said van der Linden.

The original study can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0279-9

2 comments

Unless I missed it, it looks like they didn't control for the effects of their own survey. For all we know, taking 15 minutes to drink tea between ranking news reliability.

You missed it

I played through the game and did the pre- and post- game study.

At the beginning, I tried pretty hard to genuinely gauge reliability, and was more willing to use some nuance (maybe I don't think the tweet is written fairly, but it touches on a genuine trend, so I'll give it a 3/10). There was also one that I just let slip by me (HBO tweet with some random characters that I realized probably weren't intentional markers to dodge trademarks after I instinctively hit 10/10 reliability, and also you can't go back and correct yourself).

After the game I was just so worn out I didn't feel like giving any credence to anything. Looks like you're kinda emotional? 1/10. Talking about an opinion instead of a fact? 1/10. From a celebrity? 1/10. It also looked like they weren't throwing in many or any tweets that were supposed to be "credible" or "reliable" in the feed.

I'd be interested in seeing the results 2 or 3 weeks out, and with a more even mix of "credible" and "non-credible" tweets. I have the suspicion the results won't stick, or at least won't stick well.