Reducing Misinformation When Motivated to Consume: Experimental Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

Résumé

Misinformation has deleterious and potentially destabilizing effects on democracy. As a result, scholars and practitioners alike are investigating strategies to reduce the belief in and dissemination of misinformation. A common strategy, particularly among practitioners, are digital literacy interventions to increase individual capacity to identify misinformation online. This, we argue, ignores identity-based motivations to consume biased media. We offer a theoretical framework that highlights the limitations of strategies that ignore individuals' directional motives. We propose three interventions that leverage insights on how social identity shapes behavior, and test each with an information experiment in Côte d’Ivoire, a polarized country. We find that a standard digital literacy intervention fails to curb the belief in and spread of misinformation, while our social-identity based interventions reduced both. Our findings confirm that misinformation spreads at least in part because individuals are motivated to consume biased media, and caution against strategies that ignore these directional motives.

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