Thinking more or thinking differently? Using drift-diffusion modeling to illuminate why accuracy prompts decrease misinformation sharing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent experiments have found that prompting people to think about accuracy reduces misinformation sharing intentions. The process by which this effect operates, however, remains unclear. Do accuracy prompts cause people to "stop and think," increasing deliberation? Or do they change what people think about, drawing attention to accuracy? Since these two accounts predict the same behavioral outcomes (i.e., increased sharing discernment following a prompt), we used computational modeling of sharing decisions with response time data, as well as out-of-sample ratings of headline perceived accuracy, to test the accounts' divergent predictions across six studies (N = 5633). The results suggest that accuracy prompts do not increase the amount of deliberation people engage in. Instead, they increase the weight participants put on accuracy while deliberating. By showing that prompting people makes them think better even without thinking more, our results challenge common dual-process interpretations of the accuracy-prompt effect. Our findings also highlight the importance of understanding how social media distracts people from considering accuracy, and provide evidence for scalable interventions that redirect people's attention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".