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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.

Read the paper → Frontiers in Psychiatry · 2023

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.

Paweł Gwiaździński, Aleksander B. Gundersen, Michal Piksa, Izabela Krysińska, Jonas R. Kunst, Karolina Noworyta, Agata Olejniuk, Mikołaj Morzy, Rafal Rygula, Tomi Wójtowicz, Jan Piasecki

Gwiaździński, P., Gundersen*, A. B., Piksa, M., Krysińska, I., Kunst, J. R., Noworyta, K., Olejniuk, A., Morzy, M., Rygula, R., Wójtowicz, T., & Piasecki, J. (2023). Psychological interventions countering misinformation in social media: A scoping review [Systematic Review]. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.974782