Spotting False News and Doubting True News: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of News Judgements

How good are people at judging the veracity of news? We conducted a systematic literature review and pre-registered meta-analysis of 303 effect sizes from 67 experimental articles evaluating accuracy ratings of true and fact-checked false news (NParticipants = 194,438 from 40 countries across 6 continents). We found that people rated true news as more accurate than false news (Cohen’s d = 1.12 [1.01, 1.22]) and were better at rating false news as false than at rating true news as true (Cohen’s d = 0.32 [0.24, 0.39]). In other words, participants were able to discern true from false news and erred on the side of skepticism rather than credulity. We found no evidence that the political concordance of the news had an effect on discernment, but participants were more skeptical of politically discordant news (Cohen’s d = 0.78 [0.62, 0.94]). These findings lend support to crowdsourced fact-checking initiatives and suggest that, to improve discernment, there is more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of fact-checked false news.