Educated but easily fooled? Who falls for misinformation and why

Systematic meta-analysis on online misinformation with data from over 11,500 participants in 31 experiments

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

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Nearly five billion people worldwide receive their news from social media, and the impact of misinformation—especially on elections—is of increasing concern. Despite extensive research, it remains largely unclear who is particularly vulnerable to misinformation and why. “There is a lot of research on misinformation right now, but with the volume of work, it has become increasingly difficult to see the connections between different factors,” explains lead author Mubashir Sultan. The doctoral candidate at the Center for Adaptive Rationality researches misinformation and decision-making behavior online. He and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis using data from the US, examining how factors such as education, age, gender, political identity, analytical thinking, partisan bias, motivated reflection, and familiarity with news have an impact on people’s online misinformation veracity judgments. 

The researchers found no significant impact of education on people’s ability to distinguish between true and false information. This contradicts the widespread belief that more educated individuals are likely to be less susceptible to misinformation, especially as higher education teaches us critical thinking. The study also challenges assumptions about age and misinformation. While older adults are often portrayed as more vulnerable to fake news, the analysis found that they were actually better than younger adults at distinguishing between true and false headlines. Older adults were also more skeptical and tended to label headlines as false more often. Paradoxically, however, previous research has consistently shown that older adults engage with and share more misinformation online.  

Political identity also played a key role. The meta-analysis confirmed previous research showing that individuals who identify as Republicans are more likely to fall for misinformation than those who identify as Democrats. Republicans were less accurate at assessing the veracity of news and tended to label more headlines as true, whereas Democrats were more skeptical. Individuals with higher analytical thinking skills—that is, who are better at logically evaluating information, identifying patterns, and systematically solving problems—performed better overall and were more skeptical (tending to classify news as false). People were more likely to believe that news that aligned with their political identity was true and to disregard news that was not aligned with their political identity—a phenomenon known as partisan bias. However, a counterintuitive finding was that individuals with higher analytical thinking were actually more susceptible to partisan bias. This tendency is known as motivated reflection, which is a cognitive process where individuals’ analytical reasoning works against them to protect their pre-existing beliefs, values, or partisan affiliations. The strongest effect in the meta-analysis was the influence of familiarity. When participants reported having already seen a news headline, they were more likely to believe it was true. This finding underscores the danger of repeated exposure to misinformation, particularly on social media. 

To ensure the highest reliability, the researchers conducted an individual participant data meta-analysis—considered the gold standard in the field. “Unlike traditional meta-analyses that look only at effect sizes from previous studies, this approach allows us to work with and combine individual data from each study, making the analysis much more powerful,” explains Mubashir Sultan. The researchers evaluated raw data from 31 experiments conducted in the US from 2006 to 2023. They analyzed 256,337 decisions made by 11,561 participants aged between 18 and 88 years to investigate how four demographic factors (age, gender, education, and political identity) and four psychological factors (analytical thinking, partisan bias, motivated reflection, and familiarity) impacted people’s assessment of the accuracy of online information. Participants judged the veracity of news headlines covering topics such as politics and health.  A special focus of the investigation was the distinction between the ability to recognize true and false news (discrimination ability) and response bias, which describes whether participants tend to classify news as generally true or false.  

The results come at a critical time. “The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024 identifies misinformation as one of the greatest risks to the world in the next two years. With the rise of right-wing populism, the study's results are highly relevant and could influence debates on how to best combat misinformation in different demographic groups”, says co-author Ralf Kurvers, Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. 

“The results highlight the urgent need to integrate media literacy and critical thinking skills into school curricula from an early age. Younger adults, despite being considered 'digital natives,' were less able to distinguish between true and false news,” Ralf Kurvers continues. More effective and age-appropriate media literacy programs tailored to this group are therefore crucial. Furthermore, given the strong effects of familiarity and political bias, interventions for helping people identify and share less misinformation must consider how information is presented and shared, especially on social media, where these effects are amplified. For example, effective interventions might emphasize commonalities and promote respectful dialogue across political boundaries. 

This study is part of a larger initiative by the Center for Adaptive Rationality to investigate the dynamics of online environments. The researchers aim to gain a comprehensive understanding of how these digital spaces influence politically relevant behaviors and attitudes, while also developing a strategic roadmap to address the associated challenges. A team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development recently introduced a toolbox designed to help individuals combat misinformation more effectively. 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2409329121 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors

 

Gender equality is crucial for a climate resilient future

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

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A new IIASA study shows why gender equality trends should be central when planning how societies adapt to and mitigate climate change. A society where women have little access to decision-making or finance or have less education, will be ill-equipped to find and implement solutions, ranging from concrete measures like irrigation or crop rotation, to behavior shifts and engineering the energy transition. We need to ask the “what-if” questions related to progress towards equality or deterioration of inequality. One thing is clear: gender inequality will have a high price if neglected.

Published in Nature Climate Change, the study takes a deep dive into the scenarios that underpin our understanding of climate risks and shows how understanding trajectories of gender equality is integral to understanding societies’ development pathways under climate change. The findings highlight that equal access to education, jobs, and financial services is key for effective implementation of solutions.

“The link between gender equality and climate action is so far reaching but has traditionally been neglected in mainstream climate research, especially in relation to mitigation,” said lead author Marina Andrijevic, a researcher in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program. “Ensuring that women have equal opportunities in decision-making, the labor force, and higher education across all disciplines makes the energy transition easier and more just.”

A key aspect of the study focuses on the link between climate change mitigation and gender inequality. The shift away from fossil fuels has different effects on different groups. For example, industries like coal mining have been male dominated, with women playing supportive roles in unpaid or informal labor. Moving towards renewable energy presents an opportunity to change this dynamic. With well-planned policies, more women can enter the workforce, and care work can be more evenly distributed, ensuring fairer working conditions for everyone in a cleaner economy.

“Our work was inspired by growing evidence that when women lack opportunities, from access to primary schooling to having a say at top levels of government, it weakens the ability of entire societies to respond to crises, such as climate change,” Andrijevic says. “By exploring different possible futures, we highlight how social progress plays a crucial role in shaping climate resilience.”

The authors point out how social norms can also lead to specific challenges for adaptation. For example, women face unique challenges, such as risks to maternal health, undernutrition during droughts, and exposure to diseases while collecting water. At the same time, they are deprived of access to different resources that hamper their adaptive capacity. Meanwhile, men are more likely to suffer from floods and storms, experience work-related heat stress, or face depression and suicide due to drought-related economic hardship.

Understanding the relationship between these differential risks and gender inequality is crucial for understanding how hotspots of vulnerability to climate-related risks could be best targeted.

The authors emphasize that to fully understand the challenges ahead and what societal capacity is for responding to crises such as climate change, we must study how societies will evolve. They highlight the importance of imagining different possible futures: both those where fairness and opportunity are central, and those of deepening inequalities.

The authors have received funding and support from the SPARCCLE project (grant agreement no. 101081364) under the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme and the European Research Council Consolidator Grant POPCLIMA (grant agreement no. 101002973), also funded by Horizon Europe.

Reference
Andrijevic, M., Zimm, C., Moyer, J.D., Muttarak, R., & Pachauri, S. (2025). Representing gender inequality in scenarios improves understanding of climate challenges. Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/s41558-024-02242-5

 

About IIASA:
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an international scientific institute that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Our findings provide valuable options to policymakers to shape the future of our changing world. IIASA is independent and funded by prestigious research funding agencies in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. www.iiasa.ac.at

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Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-024-02242-5 

Article Title

Representing gender inequality in scenarios improves understanding of climate challenges.

Article Publication Date

4-Feb-2025

 

Value-added pancakes: WSU using science to improve nutrition of breakfast staple

Washington State University

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WSU scientists used different lab equipment, like this one that evaluates texture, to measure the impact of using different ratios of whole wheat flours in pancakes.

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Credit: Photo courtesy Girish Ganjyal/WSU.

PULLMAN, Wash. — Typical breakfast pancakes are soft, fluffy and delicious but, sadly, not terribly healthy.
 
Food scientists at Washington State University are working to change that by boosting the popular morning favorite’s nutritional value while enhancing its taste and texture.
 
“Generally, pancakes are made with refined flours, contributing to empty calories,” said Girish Ganjyal, a professor and food processing specialist in WSU’s School of Food Science. “We wanted to see if it’s possible to make tasty pancakes with whole grains that add some fiber and protein.”
 
Ganjyal and his study co-authors replaced refined flour with whole-grain buckwheat, quinoa, millet, and whole-wheat flours in a variety of percentages ranging from 25% up to 100% apiece. The encouraging results were published in the journal Cereal Chemistry.
 
The team found that buckwheat, quinoa, and whole-wheat flours can be mixed into pancake recipes without significant changes to the taste or texture. The millet flour had to be slightly pre-cooked before it could be added seamlessly.
 
“We started with a small level of replacement flours, then kept increasing them until it wasn’t practical,” Ganjyal said. “With millet flour, for example, we found that it basically just crumbles; there was no binding.”
 
The scientists used the same recipe for all the pancakes. The different flours were the only variable, and the recipe’s leavening system and other ingredients like sugar, oil, flour, and salt remained constant. The recipes with the different flours and percentages were compared with the control pancakes, which were made with refined flour and all of the same other ingredients.
 
The study was part of WSU’s Soil to Society project, which launched in 2021 with a grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The project takes a comprehensive approach to increasing foods’ nutrient values and involves a multi-disciplinary team of plant breeders, nutrition experts, and food scientists. Ganjyal hopes flour manufacturers will use the research to produce healthier products for restaurants and consumers. 
 
He is already continuing the research by trying to understand why various flours behave differently under cooking conditions. He and his team hope to modify the flours so their textures become indistinguishable from the refined version.
 
The original project required cooking many pancakes and then measuring them at various points throughout the process for different traits like viscosity, cook time, size, and texture. The paper’s co-authors included a WSU graduate student, an undergraduate, and a high school intern with the Soil to Society project.
 
“She spent a lot of time over a griddle,” Ganjyal said. “She also learned the fundamentals of how we do our work. One of the best parts of my job is training the next generation, and hands-on experience like this lets students see how we can help improve the food system for everyone. I have been lucky to have brilliant students in my research and Extension program.”

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Journal

Cereal Chemistry

DOI

10.1002/cche.10858 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Value-added pancakes: Incorporation of whole wheat, buckwheat, quinoa, and proso millet flour into pancakes and their effect on product quality

 

Stormwater pollution sucked up by specialized sponge

Scientists reimagine lifecycle for non-renewables like metals, phosphate

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Northwestern University

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The sponge, coated with nanoparticles that have an affinity for pollutants, can collect metals like zinc and copper, as well as phosphate, and in previous iterations has successfully pulled lead from water, and microplastics and oil from lakes and oceans. It then releases these valuable resources when it is exposed to different pH’s.

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Credit: Please credit to Dravid Lab/Northwestern University

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• Reusable sponge platform has successfully removed oil, phosphate and metal from contaminated water
• New development allows capture of valuable minerals and reuse of the sponge
• Water pollution concentrations move from 0.8 parts per million to undetectable levels

EVANSTON, Ill. --- As more waterways contend with algae blooms and pollution caused by minerals from agricultural runoff and industrial manufacturing processes, new methods to remove pollutants like phosphate, copper and zinc are emerging across fields.

While solutions exist, they tend to be costly and can be used just once. But a specialized sponge created by researchers at Northwestern University that works to slurp up pollutants, and then release them as desired, may present a reusable, low-cost solution.

The sponge, coated with nanoparticles that have an affinity for pollutants, can collect metals like zinc and copper, as well as phosphate, and in previous iterations has successfully pulled lead from water, and microplastics and oil from lakes and oceans. It then releases these valuable resources when it is exposed to different pH’s.

In a paper to be published Feb. 5 in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology Water, researchers define a method to tailor their platform to specific Chicago pollutants and then selectively release them, giving resources that typically must be mined a potential for a second life.

“The technology can be used as a universal sorbent or ‘catch-all,’ or it can be tailored to certain groups of contaminants like metals, plastics or nutrients,” said principal investigator Vinayak Dravid.

Dravid is the Abraham Harris Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and a faculty affiliate of the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy. He is also the founding director of the Northwestern University Atomic and Nanoscale Characterization (NUANCE) Center as well as the Soft and Hybrid Nanotechnology Experimental (SHyNE) Resource, and also serves as the associate director for global programs at the International Institute of Nanotechnology.

What’s with the sponge?

In its first iteration, the sponge platform was made of polyurethane and coated with a substance that attracted oil and repelled water. The newest version is a highly hydrophilic (water-loving) cellulose sponge coated with particles tailored to other pollutants. The sponge platform works so effectively because of its pores, providing lots of surface area where pollutants can attach.

Dravid has at times referred to the technology as a “Swiss Army knife” thanks to its versatility and ability to be used again and again. He founded NU startup Coral Innovations (formerly MFNS-Tech) to begin the process of commercializing the sponge-based technology for environmental remediation.

A one-two P(h)unch

Stormwater treatment equipment manufacturer StormTrap, LLC learned about the platform and approached the team, asking about three specific pollutants heavily impacting Chicago. Hoping to add absorbent materials to their portfolio, StormTrap representatives asked if Dravid could get the concentration of pollutants down to untraceable amounts.

The Environmental Protection Agency sets levels for minerals based on human health that are at times higher than the amount considered safe from an environmental perspective, typically setting drinking water limits in the parts per million range when preventing algae blooms and other environmental impacts would require much smaller concentrations.

Developing the platform to capture copper, zinc and phosphate was relatively easy, but then, Kelly Matuszewski, a Ph.D. student in the Dravid group and the paper’s first author, was tasked with determining a method to get the resources back. As stores of phosphate and metals in mines are depleted, this second step is becoming critical.

“We can’t just keep flushing these minerals down the toilet,” Matuszewski said. “We need to understand how they interact and find ways to actually utilize them.”

Matuszewski found that by lowering the pH, metals flush out of the sponge. Once copper and zinc are removed, the pH is then raised, at which point phosphate comes off the sponge. She found that even after five cycles of collecting and removing minerals, the sponge worked just as well, and she was able to deliver water with untraceable amounts of pollutants.  

Matuszewski is a finalist in the FoundHer Spotlight, a competition for early career women scientists facilitated by Northwestern’s Querrey inQbation Lab. She will pitch on March 5 to the Northwestern Women’s Board, competing against seven other researchers.

Taking it to the storm drains

The partnership with StormTrap, LLC has allowed the team to assess the technology’s effectiveness and move quickly from the lab to the industry. Using the platform in real-life scenarios will be an important next step, as Matuszewski was working in a controlled environment in which each pollutant had the same relative concentration. The next phase will help them determine the amount of minerals a sponge can hold and allow them to partner with other Northwestern researchers working on creating cleaner waterways.

The paper was funded by Trienens and StormTrap and is based on work related to The Great Lakes Water Innovation Engine supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number ITE-2315268).  

Vinayak Dravid and Northwestern have financial interests (equities, royalties) in Coral Innovations.

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Journal

ACS ES&T Water

DOI

10.1021/acsestwater.4c01234 

 

Plant power: A new method to model how plants move water globally

Researchers developed a method to detail the incredible influence plants have on the movement of Earth’s water

University of Connecticut

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Graduate student Kevin Li collecting samples from trees in the UConn Forest.

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Credit: Jason Sheldon/UConn Photo

Earth systems models are an important tool for studying complex processes occurring around the planet, such as those in and between the atmosphere and biosphere, and they help researchers and policymakers better understand phenomena like climate change. Incorporating more data into these simulations can improve modeling accuracy; however, sometimes, this requires the arduous task of gathering millions of data points.

Researchers, including UConn Department of Natural Resources and the Environment Assistant Professor James Knighton, Pablo Sanchez-Martinez from the University of Edinburgh, and Leander Anderegg from the University of California Santa Barbara, have developed a method to bypass the need for gathering data for over 55,000 tree species to better account for how plants influence the flow of water around the planet. Their findings are published in Nature Scientific Data.

Plants play essential roles in Earth’s processes, from capturing carbon and making oxygen available for other life forms like humans. Plants are also responsible for the movement of water, says Knighton, where an estimated 60% of all rain is returned to the atmosphere through transpiration. This huge global-scale movement of water through plants is complex and currently represented by Earth system models (ESMs) in a simplified way says Knighton, where all plants in a region may be considered as a single entity (i.e., a plant functional type),

“Plant Functional Types (PFTs) are used because we don’t know a lot about the details of individual plant species,” says Knighton, a faculty member in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Sciences. “It would be harder to take a detailed map of vegetation over a continent and put in all the right values for each individual species so it’s easier just to consider one generic PFT.”

The problem with PFTs is that different plant species vary in their hydrologic traits – or how water moves through plants — and this oversimplification of such systemically influential traits could limit the effectiveness of available models to predict the future. Scientists have moved towards accounting for these differences by creating databases, like the TRY Plant Trait Database, where this information is collected. However, Knighton points out that only about 5,000 to 15,000 plant species have had their traits well-cataloged after several centuries of plant science.

“There are around 60,000 to 70,000 tree species on Earth, meaning that after 200 years, we know maybe 5 to 10% of what’s happening,” he says. “If that were the way we would do things, it would take us another 2,000 years or so to learn about all the plants that we needed to, and at that point, climate change has set in, and it’s too late. We can’t do that. We can’t just wait for field researchers to go out and do their studies and populate this global database. It’s still incredibly useful to conduct field studies, but those alone will not get us where we need to be fast enough.”

Knighton and his colleagues decided to address this problem and expedite the process by looking at the data for traits that are available, information like how tall a tree grows, how deep the roots descend, or how fast water flows within the plant. They then compared the history of that species and its relatedness to other species in what is called a phylogenetic test for those traits.

“We looked to see how similar trait values are between closely related species, and the idea behind that is, if these traits are critical for their survival, evolution will have preserved the trait values, they won’t be randomly dispersed,” Knighton says. “For example, if growing deep roots was critical for a certain type of plant to survive, the species that branch off from that one will probably also have deep roots, and everything that’s in that family or that genus will have a similar root structure.”

The researchers performed the test for all the traits, and Knighton says they found high levels of conservation across the phylogenetic tree, which means closely related species tend to have closer trait values.

“Then we took the phylogeny where you can take all of the plant species on Earth and map them onto each other, and show exactly how closely related each plant is to every other plant,” he says.

Knighton says they can impute the trait data if they have the information for closely related species, meaning that this data can be inferred without having to take millions of field measurements.

“We used different numerical machine learning techniques, and in doing that, we were able to come up with a database of these very critical tree values for 55,000 tree species on Earth,” he says. “If you want to do global modeling that includes more detail in the vegetation, which is important, you now have a starting point. You don’t have to use this generic, one plant species per continent approach, you could, in theory, try something more detailed, but putting in all the different species and seeing what happens.”

Knighton says they consider this work to be a low-order approximation, but it is an important starting point. As more data is collected from field researchers, the data can be used to update and refine the interpolated data to improve the accuracy of this approach.

This work is the next step in a larger project, the first step of which was a proof-of-concept experiment at a smaller, more local level. That project established this method of imputing hydrologic traits as a viable approach, and Knighton says the next step is to compare the imputed data with observational data that they are collecting in UConn Forest and from other sites around the United States.

Knighton explains there are 10 sites across the U.S. where ample data is collected, which will serve as test cases. Knighton says master’s student Caroline Stanton ’26 is currently building ecosystem models of each site, and they are calibrating high-resolution models to estimate the traits which they will compare with data that scientists have collected over the last 20 years. Then, they will compare the estimated plant trait results with the observational data collected from the site to see how the quality of the model is impacted by each approach.

Eventually, the researchers hope to apply the method to forested sites across the globe to study aspects of what drives traits to vary. Understanding the variation in traits across different plant species has the potential to strengthen the accuracy of models, but these data can also give insights into what drives the different traits to vary.

Knighton says he and his colleagues hope climate modelers will find this information helpful, but they also hope it can improve our understanding of the Earth system overall, and more about the vital roles plants play,

“Plants control our environment to an incredible degree.”

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Journal

Scientific Data

DOI

10.1038/s41597-024-04254-4 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A global dataset of tree hydraulic and structural traits imputed from phylogenetic relationships