Beyond Click to Cognition: Effective Interventions for Promoting Examination of False Beliefs in Misinformation

In the digital information ecosystem, clicks serve as a crucial gateway to fact-checking, yet the essential challenge extends beyond this to fostering cognitive shifts that update entrenched false beliefs. This study investigates effective interventions aimed at encouraging users vulnerable to misinformation, particularly those who tend to avoid incongruent facts, to examine their false beliefs. We conducted an online experiment with 627 participants, comparing metacognitive and ranking interventions. Both interventions successfully improved click behavior, with the metacognitive intervention increasing belief-examining clicks by 14 percentage points and the ranking intervention by 33 percentage points. However, only the metacognitive intervention significantly promoted users' examination of misinformation. This finding underscores the importance of interventions that go beyond merely influencing easily measurable clicks to facilitating thoughtful engagement with factchecking content. We discuss implications for designing strategies to enhance online fact-checking engagement and mitigate misinformation's societal impact.

• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.