Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a “resilience” ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.
The paper
Edit: the article might be misrepresenting the study and its findings, so it’s worth checking the paper itself. (See @realChem 's comment in the thread).
I’m not sure this is a good study. I mean I scored 85% so woohoo but you just get headlines to go off. The art of noticing disinformation is in reading articles and making inferences on them. Questions like “vaccines contain harmful chemicals” are obvious red flags but there are some that are a reasonable-sounding headline but I’d imagine the article itself would fall apart on first reading. I know half the problem is people don’t read articles but this is a very simplistic survey.
It is, and I feel the questions are quite obvious.
That being said… I’m related to conspiracy theorists. I got a first-row seat to their dumbassery on facebook before I deleted my account. And… a significant issue was paywalled articles with clickbait titles, during Covid especially. The title was a doubt-inducing questions, such as “Do vaccines make you magnetic?” and the reasoning disproving that was locked behind the paywall. And my relatives used those as confirmation that their views were true. Because the headlines introduced doubt and the content wasn’t readable. That and satire articles.
Not only is it not good, I’d dare to say it’s awful. Never mind that the headlines themselves are terribly crafted: the entire point is that one has to be critical of sources, and not take everything at face value just because it sounds somewhat convincing. It’s not about blatantly discrediting things at face value because they don’t fit what you believed to be true.
By the standards of this test, headlines such as “The CIA Subjected African-Amercians to LSD for 77 Consecutive Days in Experiment” would clearly belong in the fake news category. And if it’s supposed to test whether the (presumably American) respondent has decent insight into the realities of contemporary politics, why in the world would it include something as obscure as “Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality”. There’s literally no way of knowing without context whether the associated article would be propaganda or just an obscure piece of foreign correspondence. Many of the “true” headlines are still things one shouldn’t take for granted without checking sources, and many of the “fake” ones are cartoonish.
It’s just bad research.