Misleading But Not Fake: Measuring the Difference Between Manipulativeness Discernment and Veracity Discernment Using Psychometrically Validated Tests

Misinformation continues to pose a substantial societal problem, but the measurement of misinformation susceptibility has often been done using non-validated tests. Furthermore, research shows that misleading content (implied misinformation) is much more common than outright false content (explicit misinformation). However, there is very little research on the predictors of belief in implied misinformation, and it is unknown if susceptibility to direct and implied misinformation are psychologically similar. In addition, psychometric scale development focuses primarily on English-speaking samples, and cross-cultural scale validation remains rare. To address these questions, we ran four studies (N1 = 487, N2 = 547, N3= 490, N4= 19,773) in which we developed and validated the Manipulative Online Content Recognition Inventory (MOCRI), a test measuring a person’s ability to distinguish between misleading and neutral content, across 12 European countries. This test substantially outperforms other known predictors of misinformation susceptibility in terms of its predictive value for people’s ability to correctly identify misleading content. We also show that susceptibility to misleading and false content are psychologically different from one another, although being related. Additionally, we show that people who score high on the MOCRI are much better than low MOCRI performers at discerning manipulative from non-manipulative statements, but that this ability does not necessarily translate to better discernment in the quality of their sharing decisions, or their willingness to reply to manipulative vs. non-manipulative messages. Finally, we found the MOCRI scale to be psychometrically stable across 12 countries, meeting configural, metric, and partial scalar invariance.