Nudge Users to Healthier Decisions: A Design Approach to Encounter Misinformation in Health Forums

Health websites have increasingly become one of the main sources of health information for people around the world. Although health-seekers potentially benefit from these sources, misinformation in health forums significantly misleads people. We hypothesize that nudging users to think critically about the information might be an effective approach to encounter with effects of misinformation on their’ health. To this end, we applied elaboration-likelihood-model (ELM) in web design to explore how central and peripheral cues influence on information evaluation and eye-movement data. The results show that providing central cues such as trusted links and discussion threads encourage the participants to look at the information with more critical thinking compared to the peripheral cues such as number of stars and likes. Similarly, fixation duration and time spent in each scenario confirmed that users engaged in higher level of cognitive processing and critical thinking when central cues are dominated ELM initiators.