Psychological interventions countering misinformation in social media: A scoping review
Screening 3,561 records down to 75 studies, we mapped fifteen types of psychological intervention against misinformation. Most work in the lab; almost none have been tested on a real platform, and none at all on video networks like TikTok or YouTube. Four types stand out as actually deployable.
The paper, in plain language
Mapping the arsenal
With a Polish–Norwegian team led by Piotr Gwiaździński and Jan Piasecki, we conducted a scoping review of psychological interventions against social-media misinformation: 3,561 screened records, 75 included studies, sorted into three families — boosting competences (inoculation, media literacy, fact-checking), technocognition (design changes like source ratings), and nudging (warnings, tags, social corrections) — fifteen types in all.
The gap between lab and platform
Of the 75 studies, 46 reported success, but success in a controlled setting is not deployment: hardly any intervention had been tested inside a real social-media environment, and we found no studies at all on video-based platforms like TikTok or YouTube — where much misinformation now lives. Judging feasibility of real-world implementation, four types came out on top: source ratings, messages from trusted organizations, user-experience design changes, and tagging.
Why it matters
The review argues for marrying technocognition with nudging — building normative and social signals directly into platform design rather than treating correction as an afterthought. It also names the field's blind spots plainly: older adults are under-studied, the evidence is Western-centred, and our own feasibility scoring is a structured judgment, not a statistical instrument. This mapping is groundwork for the intervention side of my misinformation research strand.