Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a “resilience” ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.
The paper
Edit: the article might be misrepresenting the study and its findings, so it’s worth checking the paper itself. (See @realChem 's comment in the thread).
I feel like a lot of people are missing the point when it comes to the MIST. I just very briefly skimmed the paper.
Misinformation susceptibility is being vulnerable to information that is incorrect
It’s funny how the post about a misinformation test was riddled with misinformation because no one bothered to read the paper before letting their mouth run. Now, I don’t doubt that your brilliant minds can overrule a measure produced with years of research and hundreds of participants off the top of your head, but even if what I’ve said may be contradicted with a deeper analysis of the paper, shouldn’t it be the baseline?
Not saying you’re wrong at all, but I just did the test and it’s kinda funny that the title of this article would certainly have been one of the “fake news” examples.
Obviously the study shows that the test is useful (as you pointed out quite well!), but it’s ironic that the type of “bait” that they want people to recognize as fake news was used as the title of the article for the paper.
(Also, not saying the authors knew about or approved the article title or anything)
@potsnpans@beehaw.org made some nice points breaking down some unreasonable extrapolations from the paper to the article
Thank you for this!
I have to say though, it’s really interesting to see the reactions here, given the paper’s findings. Because in the study, while people got better at spotting fake news after the game/test, they got worse at identifying real news, and overall more distrustful of news in general. I feel like that’s on display here - with people (somewhat correctly) mistrusting the misleading article, but also (somewhat incorrectly) mistrusting the research behind it.
That’s a very interesting anecdote, now that you say it
Thanks for this. I’ll freely admit I’m an idiot and didn’t feel smart enough to understand the paper (see username). Clarification is much welcome.
I added the link to the paper to the body of the post.