Norm-enhanced prebunking for actively open-minded thinking indirectly improves misinformation discernment and reduces conspiracy beliefs

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated that actively open-minded thinking (AOT)—a cognitive thinking style characterized by the active avoidance of myside bias and overconfidence in one's conclusions—is related to lower misinformation susceptibility. Furthermore, logic-based inoculation has proven effective at conferring resistance against misinformation and conspiracy beliefs. Building on these findings, the current article outlines two pre-registered experiments, conducted on Reddit.com (Study 1, N = 462) and Prolific (Study 2, N = 464), wherein participants were either allocated to a control condition or presented with an inoculation message prebunking failure to engage in AOT. We hypothesised that improvements in AOT relative to the control group should indirectly reduce misinformation susceptibility and conspiracy beliefs. Results showed that in both studies, the AOT inoculation significantly improved AOT relative to the control group, and in turn, reduced conspiracy beliefs and improved veracity discernment of real news headlines from fake ones. Furthermore, the intervention also improved sharing decisions (Study 1), and its efficacy was exclusive to improving AOT rather than its individual epistemic components (Study 2). We provide recommendations for future efforts to reduce misinformation susceptibility using logic-based inoculation and discuss the theoretical implications of our findings.