Identifying and Debunking Environmentally-Related False News Stories – An Experimental Investigation

Most research on false information is currently beeing conducted in the realm of politics and Covid-19. This study addresses environmentally-related news stories. With the help of two experiments, I explore determi-nants that can explain who is good at distinguishing between accurate (i.e., factually correct) and false information, and compare several intervention sce-narios to debunk false information. In experiment one, subjects had to rate environmentally-related news stories as accurate or false. Afterward, subjects re-ceived systematically varied information about the correctness of the news stories depending on the ex-perimental condition they had been randomly as-signed to. After a period of three weeks, the subjects were asked to evaluate the news stories again (exper-iment two). In experiment one, I find that the per-ceived familiarity with news stories increased the propensity to accept them as true. Moreover, actively open-minded thinking helped to distinguish between accurate and false information. But the willingness to think deliberately did not seem to be important. In experiment two, it can be found that by repeating false news stories, subjects were more likely to adequately identify them later (i.e., no evidence for a familiarity backfire effect). However, it decreased the likelihood to adequately identify accurate news stories. A some-what reverse, but weaker effect occurred when factu-ally correct news stories were repeated: the correct identification of accurate news stories was more suc-cessful, but the opposite holds for the identification of false news stories.