In Experiment 1, we tested separately the efficacy of pop-up and monetary incentives, and compared their effects to a control condition with no interventions. To assess that the effect of the interventions is effective over the widest possible range of contexts, we used a set of 9 different Facebook posts varying in various properties, such as the scientific topic, the source reputation, and its level of factual reporting. The original pre-registration of this experiment can be retrieved from osf.io/gsu9j.
Materials and methods
Ethics statement
All participants gave their written informed consent for participating in the experiment. The experimental protocols were approved by the Research Ethics Committee (CER) at the University of Paris (IRB No: 00012021-05), and all research was performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.
Participants
We recruited 2700 U.K. residents through the online platform prolific.co on 11 March 2021 (for a rationale of sample size, see S1 Methods ). Average age was 36 ((SD=13.5), 8 not specified), 60.7% of participants were female, (39.1% male, 0.2% other), and 55.6% had a Bachelor’s degree or higher. Although recruitment explicitly specified that the experiment was supported only on computers or laptops, 316 participants (11.7%) completed the experiment on a mobile device.
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Source: Lateral reading and monetary incentives to spot disinformation about science | Scientific Reports