| As fake news spreads rapidly on social media, threatening informed decision-making and public
understanding, evidence-based interventions to combat its spread are of critical importance.
Accuracy prompts are a promising intervention to improve the discernment of sharing headlines
online, but their efficacy among those who are the most susceptible to sharing fake news remains
unclear. Given that individuals with less analytic cognitive styles, more conservative political
partisans, and those with higher levels of generalized overconfidence may be especially
vulnerable to believing and sharing fake news, it is critical to evaluate the efficacy of
interventions across these individual differences. In the current study, a sample of 710 Prolific
participants were randomly assigned to receive no intervention (control), to rate the accuracy of
non-political headlines (evaluation-only), or to rate the accuracy of non-political headlines and
make confidence judgments (evaluation + confidence). Then, all participants completed a
sharing intentions task, followed by measures of analytic cognitive style (CRT), generalized
overconfidence (GOT), and self-identified political partisanship. Neither accuracy prompt
intervention improved sharing discernment, but caused a decrease in sharing intentions for both
true and false headlines. Additionally, the effect of accuracy prompts on sharing discernment
was not moderated by individual differences in analytic cognitive style, political partisanship, or
generalized overconfidence. However, a more Republican political partisanship was associated
with worse sharing discernment and higher sharing intentions for false news headlines, and
higher levels of generalized overconfidence were associated with higher sharing intentions for
both true and false news headlines. The findings advance our theoretical understanding of factors
predicting fake news sharing and have implications for the development of targeted interventions
to reduce the spread of misinformation online.
Keywords: misinformation, fake news, metacognition, analytic thinking, overconfidence |