Can Creating Misinformation Enable its Discernment?

Misinformation continues to pose a challenge to information integrity, making it critical toidentify novel ways to reduce its spread. Building on previous intervention studies, weinvestigated the role of creating misleading headlines as an inoculation strategy to improvesubsequent truth discernment in an online mixed (pre-post within and between-groups) preregistereddesign. Indian participants (N = 646, 388 men, 255 women, Mage = 30.46 years) wereassigned to one of the three conditions: misinformation (active generation of misleadingheadlines based on common tactics used in fake news), depict (passive reading of these tactics),or a control group (no intervention). Discernment was measured based on reliability, sharingintention, and confidence ratings on true and false headlines, presented before and after theintervention. Both misinformation and depict conditions improved truth discernment, butintervention effects were cancelled out when individual difference variables of political ideologyand dark personality traits were added in models. Overall, there were imprecise interventioneffects of both conditions, where sharing intention was reduced, but for all headlines, not justfalse ones. In the misinformation condition, headlines created by participants were also rated forfluency, creativity, valence, and task-appropriateness. More creative and misleading headlineswere associated with lower sharing in general on the post-test, indicating greater caution insharing any news, reflective of critical evaluation. Future research can refine this intervention toassess its effectiveness over time and across contexts.