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Educative Interventions to Combat Misinformation: Evidence from a Field Experiment in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2021

SUMITRA BADRINATHAN Open the ORCID record for SUMITRA BADRINATHAN [Opens in a new window]
SUMITRA BADRINATHAN*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
Sumitra Badrinathan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, sumitra.badrinathan@politics.ox.ac.uk.
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Abstract

Misinformation makes democratic governance harder, especially in developing countries. Despite its real-world import, little is known about how to combat misinformation outside of the United States, particularly in places with low education, accelerating Internet access, and encrypted information sharing. This study uses a field experiment in India to test the efficacy of a pedagogical intervention on respondents’ ability to identify misinformation during the 2019 elections (N = 1,224). Treated respondents received hour-long in-person media literacy training in which enumerators discussed inoculation strategies, corrections, and the importance of verifying misinformation, all in a coherent learning module. Receiving this hour-long media literacy intervention did not significantly increase respondents’ ability to identify misinformation on average. However, treated respondents who support the ruling party became significantly less able to identify pro-attitudinal stories. These findings point to the resilience of misinformation in India and the presence of motivated reasoning in a traditionally nonideological party system.

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Type
Research Article
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American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 1325 - 1341
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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