First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news
phys.org
University of Cambridge psychologists have developed the first validated "misinformation susceptibility test": a quick two-minute quiz that gives a solid indication of how vulnerable a person is to being duped by the kind of fabricated news that floods online spaces.

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).

  • somefool@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    As a terminally online millennial, I was scared for a second, but I did okay on the test. Then again, I’m 40 and barely even qualify as ‘millennial’, and not at all as ‘young’.

    I found the language of the questions was glaringly obvious. What do you think?

    • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I found the language of the questions was glaringly obvious. What do you think?

      It’s potentially on purpose, to exploit the fact that fake news have often a certain “discursive pattern”.

    • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I thought that without any article text it was very difficult. Is the government trying to increase acceptance of genetic modification? Well, if the goal is to improve agricultural outputs they probably should be; I would expect that there is a pamphlet or website somewhere that helpfully explains that genetically modified crops are safe to consume and can be made more productive, or more resistant to pests or drought, or enhanced in other beneficial ways. That should count right?

      But I marked it as false because based on the tone I assumed the associated article would actually be about modifying babies or something. I scored 20/20, which means I was rewarded for making assumptions about the article without reading it, which is not a good method for determining the truth of an article in real life!

      Basically in order to achieve a good score, I stopped thinking about the information itself and started thinking about why the specific headlines were chosen for the test, which means they probably aren’t measuring what they believe they’re measuring.