Explaining Why Headlines Are True or False Reduces Intentions to Share False Information

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing interest among academics and the public in ways to curb the spread of misinformation on social media. A recent experiment demonstrated that explanation prompts—simply asking people to explain why they think information is true or false—can reduce intentions to share false, but not true, political headlines on social media (Fazio, 2020). However, there is currently only one experiment demonstrating the benefits of this intervention, and this experiment manipulated the treatment between-subjects, raising concerns about differential attrition across the treatment and control groups over the course of the experiment. Thus, the present experiment (N = 499 US MTurkers) replicates Fazio (2020) in a within-subjects design, with all participants taking part in both the treatment and control conditions in two successive blocks. We replicate the effect of the intervention—explaining why headlines were true or false selectively reduced intentions to share false headlines. Our results also reveal that the longevity of the impact of these prompts is limited—encountering the explanation prompts did not reduce subsequent intentions to share false information when the explanation prompts were removed. Overall, our results suggest that encouraging people to pause and think about the truth of information can improve the quality of user-shared information on social media.