Yesterday Dan Willingham shared this study with a depressing result. Modirrousta-Galian and colleagues examined in a pre-registered trial 3 approaches to teach students to recognize fake news and compared those approaches with the results of a control group that got nothing. They expected that at least one, and hopefully the three approaches, would have been more effective than doing nothing. But sadly, this wasn’t the case:

Regarding the main analysis, there were no significant differences in true and fake news discrimination between any of the four conditions. This contradicted our hypothesis that the gamified intervention would be the most effective, followed by its non-gamified equivalent, then Bad News, and finally the control group. As for the exploratory analyses, there were four key results: (a) being younger, female, and left-wing was associated with better discrimination; (b) discrimination deteriorated across training blocks in the non-gamified and gamified training phases; (c) participants were most willing to replay the non-gamified, Bad News, and gamified training phases, in that order; and (d) at the item level, the non-gamified and gamified interventions lowered reliability ratings to fake news items (relative to baseline) more than the Bad News intervention, but the effects were only marginally significant. There was no difference between the conditions for true news items.

Abstract of the study:

This preregistered study tests a novel psychological intervention to improve news veracity discernment. The main intervention involved inductive learning (IL) training (i.e., practice discriminating between multiple true and fake news exemplars with feedback) with or without gamification. Participants (N = 282 Prolific users) were randomly assigned to either a gamified IL intervention, a nongamified version of the same IL intervention, a no-treatment control group, or a Bad News intervention, a notable web-based game designed to tackle online misinformation. Following the intervention (if applicable), all participants rated the veracity of a novel set of news headlines. We hypothesized that the gamified intervention would be the most effective for improving news veracity discernment, followed by its nongamified equivalent, then Bad News, and finally the control group. The results were analyzed with receiver-operating characteristic curve analyses, which have previously never been applied to news veracity discernment. The analyses indicated that there were no significant differences between conditions and the Bayes factor indicated very strong evidence for the null. This finding raises questions about the effectiveness of current psychological interventions and contradicts prior research that has supported the efficacy of Bad News. Age, gender, and political leaning all predicted news veracity discernment.