Participants were given a headline that did not relate to COVID-19, and they were asked to rate its accuracy. The prompt was essentially priming the participants with the concept of accuracy.

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Evaluation Prompt

Participants were shown 8 (4 true, 4 false) headlines that were not related to COVID-19. They were told whether they answered correctly or falsely after every response, and whether each headline was real or fake news.

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Long Evaluation Prompt

As part of this treatment, participants were asked how important it was for them to share accurate news on social media. 

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Importance Prompt

Participants were given four tips related to digital literacy. These were selected from an intervention that was performed by Facebook. 

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Tips Prompt

In this condition, participants were told that the majority of people (over 80%) who had responded to the survey had indicated that thinking about accuracy is important prior to sharing information.

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Generic Norms Prompt

Participants were told that 8 out of 10 people that had took the survey said that it was either "very important" or "extremely important" to share only accurate news. They were also told that this was true irrespective of political beliefs.

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Partisan Norms Prompt

This condition was comprised of both the Partisan Norms and the Tips treatments (in that sequence).

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Tips + Norms Prompt

Participants in this condition were exposed to both the Importance and the Partisan Norms treatments (in a random sequence).

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Importance + Norms Prompt

- Evaluation
- Long Evaluation
- Importance 
- Tips
- Generic Norms
- Partisan Norms
- Tips + Norms
- Importance + Norms

Davidson College

While the researchers found that participants were significantly more likely to rate true headlines as accurate and false headlines as inaccurate, they found that veracity had so significant effect on people's intentions to share the headlines. As such they used eight types of prompts to investigate whether they could decrease people's sharing intentions.

COVID-19 Misinformation Prompt Toolkit: Veracity vs. Sharing Intentions

Epstein, Z., Berinsky, A. J., Cole, R., Gully, A., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021). Developing an accuracy-prompt toolkit to reduce COVID-19 misinformation online. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-71

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