Infodemics: Do healthcare professionals detect corona-related false news stories better than students?

False news stories cause welfare losses and fatal health consequences. To limit its dissemination, it is essential to know what determines the ability to distinguish between true and false news stories. In our experimental study, we present subjects corona-related stories taken from the media from v...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2021-03, Vol.16 (3), p.e0247517-e0247517
Main Authors: Grüner, Sven, Krüger, Felix
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biology and Life Sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Communications Media - standards
Communications Media - statistics & numerical data
Comparative analysis
Corona
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Deception
Disease transmission
Economic aspects
Educational Status
Female
Funding
Health aspects
Health care
Health Personnel - standards
Health Personnel - statistics & numerical data
Humans
Information Dissemination - methods
Knowledge
Male
Medical personnel
Medicine and Health Sciences
News
News media
Open access publishing
People and places
Psychological aspects
Regression Analysis
Students
Students - statistics & numerical data
Validity
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:False news stories cause welfare losses and fatal health consequences. To limit its dissemination, it is essential to know what determines the ability to distinguish between true and false news stories. In our experimental study, we present subjects corona-related stories taken from the media from various categories (e.g. social isolation, economic consequences, direct health consequences, and strong exaggeration). The subject's task is to evaluate the stories as true or false. Besides students with and without healthcare background, we recruit healthcare professionals to increase the external validity of our study. Our main findings are: (i) Healthcare professionals perform similar to students in correctly distinguishing between true and false news stories. (ii) The propensity to engage in analytical thinking and actively open-minded thinking is positively associated with the ability to distinguish between true and false. (iii) We find that the residence of the subjects (East- or West-Germany) plays only a minor role. (iv) If news stories are in line with existing narratives, subjects tend to think that the stories are true.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0247517