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

Sven Gruener and Felix Krüger

No 86j5v, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: 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 the subjects corona-related stories taken from the media from various categories (e.g. social isolation, economic consequences, direct health consequences, and “bullshit”). The 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 narratives contradict the content of a story, subjects tend to think that the stories are wrong.

Date: 2020-08-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5f3a45c63bf2520100a25e2e/

Related works:
Working Paper: Infodemics: Do healthcare professionals detect corona-related false news stories better than students? (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:86j5v

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/86j5v

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().