Why fall for misinformation? Role of information processing strategies, health consciousness, and overconfidence in health literacy.

IF 2.5 3区心理学 Q2 PSYCHOLOGY, CLINICAL

Journal of Health Psychology Pub Date : 2024-08-22 DOI:10.1177/13591053241273647

Rachel X Peng, Fuyuan Shen

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Abstract

Health misinformation, defined as false or misleading claims lacking scientific evidence, poses a significant threat to public health. This paper investigates factors associated with the failure to discern misinformation, including health consciousness, information processing strategies, and inaccurate self-assessments of health literacy. Through an online experiment involving 707 English-speaking U.S. participants (mean age = 43 years, 56.2% female), we found that misinformation beliefs about nutrition, vaccination, vaping, and cancer were significantly correlated, implying susceptibility across health topics. Greater susceptibility was associated with higher health consciousness, lower objective health literacy, more elaboration, and more selective scanning. Results provided evidence for the Dunning-Kruger effect and metacognitive monitoring errors, whereby confident individuals were unaware of inadequate health literacy and showed poor misinformation identification. Findings suggest that promoting both health literacy education and cognitive reflection skills among the general adult population could empower them to more critically evaluate online health information.

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为什么会被误导？信息处理策略、健康意识和过度自信在健康素养中的作用。

健康误导信息是指缺乏科学依据的虚假或误导性声明，对公众健康构成重大威胁。本文研究了与无法辨别错误信息有关的因素，包括健康意识、信息处理策略和不准确的健康素养自我评估。通过一项有 707 名讲英语的美国参与者（平均年龄 = 43 岁，56.2% 为女性）参与的在线实验，我们发现，有关营养、疫苗接种、吸食毒品和癌症的错误信息信念存在显著的相关性，这意味着不同健康主题的易感性不同。更易受误导与更高的健康意识、更低的客观健康素养、更多的阐述和更多的选择性扫描有关。研究结果提供了邓宁-克鲁格效应和元认知监测错误的证据，即自信的人意识不到自己的健康素养不足，对错误信息的识别能力较差。研究结果表明，在普通成年人中推广健康素养教育和认知反思技能，可以使他们更有能力批判性地评估在线健康信息。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Health Psychology PSYCHOLOGY, CLINICAL-

CiteScore

7.50

自引率

3.10%

发文量

期刊介绍： ournal of Health Psychology is an international peer-reviewed journal that aims to support and help shape research in health psychology from around the world. It provides a platform for traditional empirical analyses as well as more qualitative and/or critically oriented approaches. It also addresses the social contexts in which psychological and health processes are embedded. Studies published in this journal are required to obtain ethical approval from an Institutional Review Board. Such approval must include informed, signed consent by all research participants. Any manuscript not containing an explicit statement concerning ethical approval and informed consent will not be considered.