Background and Rationale: The spread of misinformation poses significant challenges to public discourse, democratic processes, and social cohesion. To design effective interventions, it's crucial to understand how sociodemographic factors, such as education, gender, and familiarity with technology, interact with psychological processes. These factors play a vital role in how people access, trust, and engage with digital information. They affect how vulnerable someone is to believing misinformation and their likelihood of sharing it. This study aims to unpack the complex relationship to inform targeted intervention strategies. Methodology: This study examines the impact of sociodemographic factors on individuals' interactions with online misinformation. It focuses on the important difference between belief, or perceived believability, and action, or willingness to share, which we refer to as the belief-action gap. We employed a novel approach using PsychoPy to display 36 synthetic, news-like images generated by the AI model DALL-E. This method of using AI-generated content offers strong experimental control while maintaining real-world relevance in an era of increasingly advanced synthetic media. A total of 102 participants rated each image, paired with a caption and headline, for believability and shareability on a 5-point scale. We also assessed their education level, gender, and familiarity with social media. Findings: Linear regression analysis showed significant effects of education and technological familiarity on how people engage with misinformation. Higher education levels, particularly master's and doctoral degrees, as well as greater familiarity with social media, were associated with lower engagement scores. This suggests that these groups possess better critical evaluation skills.

Authors:
Ankita Sharma, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Ankita Sharma is Professor of Psychology at School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule

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