ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2023
(Why) Is Misinformation a Problem?
Article in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Overcoming health misinformation in marginalized groups: a systematic review.International journal for equity in health · 2025Pooled it
- Disinformation, Psychosocial Vulnerability, and Media Trust in the Digital Era: Implications for Health Behaviour and Societal Resilience.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Limits of the Ease-of-Retrieval Effect in Real and Fake News Credibility Judgments: Two Preregistered Experiments.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- AI-supported real-time news evaluation reveals effects of time constraint on misinformation discernment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Reality erosion in digital environments: the concept of digital blur and scale development.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Advocating for a community-centred model for responding to potential information harms.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Bypassing versus correcting misinformation: Efficacy and fundamental processes.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- ["How to get your Doxy-PEP?": vulnerabilities and critical routes encountered by men in the therapeutic itinerary in Brazil].Cadernos de saude publica · 2025Article
- Understanding and Combating Misinformation: An Evolutionary Perspective.JMIR infodemiology · 2024Article
- Article
- Teaching epistemic integrity to promote reliable scientific communication.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- A novel approach to fake news classification using LSTM-based deep learning models.Frontiers in big data · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the last decade there has been a proliferation of research on misinformation. One important aspect of this work that receives less attention than it should is exactly why misinformation is a problem. To adequately address this question, we must first look to its speculated causes and effects. We examined different disciplines (computer science, economics, history, information science, journalism, law, media, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology) that investigate misinformation. The consensus view points to advancements in information technology (e.g., the Internet, social media) as a main cause of the proliferation and increasing impact of misinformation, with a variety of illustrations of the effects. We critically analyzed both issues. As to the effects, misbehaviors are not yet reliably demonstrated empirically to be the outcome of misinformation; correlation as causation may have a hand in that perception. As to the cause, advancements in information technologies enable, as well as reveal, multitudes of interactions that represent significant deviations from ground truths through people's new way of knowing (intersubjectivity). This, we argue, is illusionary when understood in light of historical epistemology. Both doubts we raise are used to consider the cost to established norms of liberal democracy that come from efforts to target the problem of misinformation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.