An inductive learning intervention to improve news veracity discernment.

Across three preregistered experiments (total N = 1,135), we tested whether an inductive learning (IL) intervention improved participants' news veracity discernment (i.e., ability to distinguish between true and false news).IL involves learning categories by observing or classifying exemplars.Therefore, in this research, IL involved observing true and false news headlines and classifying them as either "true" or "false," with immediate feedback on accuracy.In Experiment 1 (N = 214), the IL intervention significantly improved participants' news veracity discernment compared to the control, but the Bayesian evidence was only anecdotal.In Experiment 2 (N = 483), we incorporated game-design elements into the IL intervention, including performance-contingent badges.Unexpectedly, the effect of the IL intervention decreased.We reasoned that, because the IL intervention involved easy-to-hard classification training, the provision of performance-contingent badges inadvertently made participants more aware of their declining performance.This awareness may have undermined their motivation to learn as the training progressed.Therefore, in Experiment 3 (N = 438), we implemented hard-to-easy classification training instead, and the IL intervention significantly improved participants' news veracity discernment, now with strong Bayesian evidence. Public Significance StatementInductive learning involves learning new concepts or categories by being exposed to exemplars of those concepts or categories.Previous research has shown that inductive learning can improve people's ability to distinguish between a wide variety of categories, such as different painting styles, bird families, French pronunciations, and even malignant versus benign skin lesions.To our knowledge, this article is the first to extend these findings to the domain of news media, showing that inductive learning can improve people's ability to distinguish between true and false news headlines.