Open AccessInfodemics: Do healthcare professionals detect corona-related false news stories better than students?
Author(s) -
Sven Grüner,
Felix Krüger
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0247517
Subject(s) - health care , narrative , psychology , exaggeration , health professionals , social psychology , political science , literature , psychiatry , art , law
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 subjects corona-related stories taken from the media from various categories (e.g. social isolation, economic consequences, direct health consequences, and strong exaggeration). The subject’s 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 news stories are in line with existing narratives, subjects tend to think that the stories are true.