Psychological Underpinnings of Misinformation Countermeasures: A Systematic Scoping Review

Abstract

There has been substantial scholarly effort to (a) investigate the psychological underpinnings of why individuals believe in misinformation, and (b) develop interventions that hamper their acceptance and spread. However, there is a lack of systematic integration of these two research lines. We conducted a systematic scoping review of empirically tested psychological interventions (N = 176) to counteract misinformation. We developed an intervention map and analyzed boosting, inoculation, identity management, nudging, and fact-checking interventions as well as various subdimensions. We further examined how these interventions are theoretically derived from the two most prominent psychological accounts for misinformation susceptibility: classical and motivated reasoning. We find that the majority of misinformation studies examined fact-checking interventions, are poorly linked to basic psychological theory and not geared towards reducing motivated reasoning. Based on this, we outline future research avenues for effective psychological countermeasures against misinformation.