Pennycook, G., Bear, A., Collins, E. T., & Rand, D. G. (2020). The implied truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news headlines increases perceived accuracy of headlines without warnings. Management Science, 66(11), 4944-4957. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3478

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Researchers were interested in studying the implied truth effect, which they defined as people perceiving misinformation that is not identified and therefore without warnings as more accurate than actual true information merely due to the lack of warnings. They studied this through two experiments to determine if adding verification to accurate information would decrease user beliefs in misinformation that failed to be labeled.

The implied truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news headlines increases perceived accuracy of headlines without warnings

- Used a Bayesian model to track headlines tagged with warnings based on the probability that a headline is fact-checked and the probability that fact-checkers did not correctly identify headlines with false information 
- Used Bayes’ rule to calculate changes in an individual’s perceptions when they see a headline with or without warnings 
- Since researchers found that a warning effect decreases people’s beliefs when they see a warning and the implied truth effect leads them to believe in the accuracy of the information when there are no warnings, they proceeded with two experiments to study these two effects in depth
- To verify the implied truth effect, researchers decided to run a separate experiment by adding verification tags to compare findings to the experiment with headlines containing warning vs. no warning

The implied truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news headlines increases perceived accuracy of headlines without warnings - model

- Verifying warning tags removes a layer of vagueness for people when determining if headlines have been fact-checked or not 
- Other than perceived accuracy, there are other factors that influence whether a person chooses to share information they deem to be accurate or not because even in the warning and verification treatment where true information is explicitly labeled, participants were less likely to share untagged headlines

The implied truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news headlines increases perceived accuracy of headlines without warnings - discussion

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