Are social demographic, psychological, and cognitive predictors of susceptibility to misinformation, dependent on the context (i.e., topic/domain) of the information?

Our team will compare two survey data sets in the area of misinformation: 1) COVID-19, 2) Climate Change. Both data sets have matching variables across a number of constructs thought to influence susceptibility to misinformation. We will compare which variables are significant predictors of misinformation across contexts.

Misinformation Discernment Scores following methods used in Pennycook et al. (2021). To measure susceptibility to misinformation we have participants rate accuracy/belief on a series of news statements. Half the statements were true and have were false. We then created a difference score between the average accuracy ratings found on the true and false stimuli. This difference score was our dependent variable representing susceptibility to misinformation.

These statements were either about COVID-19 or Climate Change depending on the data set.

To address our research question, we will compare the statistical relationships of our independent and dependent variables across our misinformation data sets. We will use a multivariate regression, modelling susceptibility to misinformation as the outcome variable. We will take the independent variables listed in the pre-analysis plan and use them across data sets. Our goal is to 1) identify which predictors of misinformation susceptibility are similar/dissimilar across COVID-19 and Climate Change, and 2) Compare the overall variance explained and individual predictor effect sizes across misinformation areas.