The project aims to design and test a new, feasible strategy to combat misinformation based on naturally occurring cognitive biases, namely the similarity between misinformation and its contradiction.

Every day a vast amount of misinformation and Fake News are repeated and infinitely shared, reaching millions of people in a short time. The large-scale dissemination of misinformation is one of the major challenges that current societies face, with long-lasting costs to individuals and governments. European Commission’s recent efforts in seeking advice from experts regarding measures to counteract disinformation attest to the urgency of addressing this issue. The fact that people tend to believe in information they repeatedly encounter and to reject claims that contradict what they heard before makes misinformation-correction very difficult. Since most correction strategies entail both a repetition of the false claims and their contradiction, they ironically end up strengthening the validity of the misinformation they attempt to correct. It is thus of the utmost importance to examine the mechanisms that may contribute to the development of effective misinformation-correction actions.

In times of fake news and massive media manipulation, it is of highest societal relevance to explore how individuals can correct their judgments from unwanted influences. When people need to make a judgment about a stimulus in their environment, they are influenced not only by judgment-relevant characteristics of that stimulus and the content of their thoughts but also by the metacognitive feelings that accompany stimulus perception and thinking. One potent metacognitive feeling is the subjective experience of processing fluency, that is, the feeling of ease or difficulty with which information is processed. While fluency can be useful because it enables fast and effortless judgments, it is also often a source of bias with harmful results for judgment accuracy. This led to a vast amount of research on the processes that allow the correction of unwanted fluency biases, and classical research outlined two requirements of judgmental correction: a) awareness of the source of bias; and b) valid knowledge of the direction of the biasing effect. However, recent evidence on the correction of fluency effects shows that some fluency effects can be corrected for but others cannot, even if the above-mentioned requirements were seemingly fulfilled. The aim of this proposal is therefore to explore a new moderating variable of fluency correction success. I propose that different fluency effects vary in a) the degree of bias salience and thus in bias awareness; and b) the degree to which the relevant naïve theories individuals use for correction entail valid knowledge about the direction of the biasing effect.