SynthesisProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors.
Synthesis in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Pooled it
- Psychological understanding of misinformation and disinformation in the face of environmental crises: Introduction to the special issue.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Sampling and processing of climate change information and disinformation across three diverse countries.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Shared memories of event details in the human brain are altered by misinformation and test expectations.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Climate change and social health.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Disinformation, Psychosocial Vulnerability, and Media Trust in the Digital Era: Implications for Health Behaviour and Societal Resilience.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Development and validation of a tool for detecting misinformation risk in diet, nutrition, and health content (Diet-MisRAT).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- AI-supported real-time news evaluation reveals effects of time constraint on misinformation discernment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Susceptibility to digital health misinformation: a multi-level narrative review.Frontiers in public health · 2026Review
- Understanding the impact of misinformation on adolescents.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Understanding Partisan Bias in Judgments of Misinformation: Identity Protection Versus Differential Knowledge.Psychological science · 2026Article
- Emotional responses and engagement with misinformation in adolescents.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Political identity, algorithmic news exposure, and trust in digital media: the sequential mediating associations of motivated reasoning and misinformation susceptibility.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Neither inaccurate nor biased in later life: Age-related differences in the accuracy and bias of facial trustworthiness judgment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The impact of interventions against science disinformation in high school students.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Online Misinformation Susceptibility Scale: Development and Initial Validation.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- People adhere to content warning labels even when they are wrong due to ecologically rational adaptations.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Metacognition biases information seeking in assessing ambiguous news.Communications psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Nearly five billion people use and receive news through social media and there is widespread concern about the negative consequences of misinformation on social media (e.g., election interference, vaccine hesitancy). Despite a burgeoning body of research on misinformation, it remains largely unclear who is susceptible to misinformation and why. To address this, we conducted a systematic individual participant data meta-analysis covering 256,337 unique choices made by 11,561 US-based participants across 31 experiments. Our meta-analysis reveals the impact of key demographic and psychological factors on online misinformation veracity judgments. We also disentangle the ability to discern between true and false news (discrimination ability) from response bias, that is, the tendency to label news as either true (true-news bias) or false (false-news bias). Across all studies, participants were well above-chance accurate for both true (68.51%) and false (67.24%) news headlines. We find that older age, higher analytical thinking skills, and identifying as a Democrat are associated with higher discrimination ability. Additionally, older age and higher analytical thinking skills are associated with a false-news bias (caution). In contrast, ideological congruency (alignment of participants' ideology with news), motivated reflection (higher analytical thinking skills being associated with a greater congruency effect), and self-reported familiarity with news are associated with a true-news bias (naïvety). We also find that experiments on MTurk show higher discrimination ability than those on Lucid. Displaying sources alongside news headlines is associated with improved discrimination ability, with Republicans benefiting more from source display. Our results provide critical insights that can help inform the design of targeted interventions.
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.