Systematic Review of Educational Approaches to Misinformation

Abstract

Misinformation can have severe negative effects on people’s decisions, behaviors, and on society at large. This creates a need to develop and evaluate educational interventions that prepare people to recognize and respond to misinformation. We systematically review 107 articles describing educational interventions across various lines of research. In characterizing existing educational interventions, this review combines a theory-driven approach with a data-driven approach. The theory-driven approach uncovered that educational interventions differ in terms of how they define misinformation and regarding which misinformation characteristics they target. The data-driven approach uncovered that educational interventions have been addressed by research on the misinformation effect, lie detection, information literacy, and fraud trainings, with each line of research yielding different types of interventions. Furthermore, this article reviews evidence about the interventions’ effectiveness. Besides identifying several promising types of interventions, comparisons across different lines of research yield open questions that future research should address to identify ways to increase people's resilience towards misinformation.