The test measures which people are most susceptible to online misinformation, and it's not who you might think.
Misinformation is all around us, invisible, just like germs in a hospital. And much like germs, we might not like to think about it, but we should -- because it's not a question of if we'll come in contact with misinformation, it's how much harm it will cause when we do.
False information presented as news or credible advice causes all kinds of harm, from measles outbreaks and fake cancer cures to political violence and loss of income from financial scams. This harm is contagious. We can inadvertently spread it to our friends, families, and others in our sphere of influence if we share it in conversation or repost it on our social media.
When we repost an interesting news story, how do we know we're not actually spreading misinformation? It turns out some people are better at spotting fake news headlines than others, and researchers want to understand why.
Turns out it's not just twitchy conspiracy theorists that get fooled by fake headlines, and it's not your elderly gran you need to worry about most.
So, how confident are you that you can spot fake headlines? What is misinformation?
To define our terms, disinformation is false information deliberately designed to manipulate or deceive the reader. Fake news and scam health advice are types of disinformation. Misinformation, by contrast, is also false but is not always shared with bad intentions. Spreading misinformation could be as simple as sharing an outdated statistic, misunderstanding a news report, or passing along a viral claim you thought was true.
I'm embarrassed to admit I've been guilty of this. Based on a post I saw on social media, I once proclaimed to my partner's entire family that some US billionaire or other had enough money to give one million dollars to every American citizen and still have a billion left over for himself. They were right to doubt me, because if I had taken the time to fact-check this little tidbit, I would have realized the math was way off (you would need over 335 trillion dollars to pull this off).
Even though I know better, I carelessly damaged my own credibility and learned an important lesson that day: Check your facts before repeating stuff or people you care about will think you're dumb. While this is a relatively harmless example; other types of misinformation can do far more damage.
The most harmful misinformation tends to be related to health, politics, or financial scams, and this harm can occur not just to individuals but also to society at large.
For example, recent measles outbreaks have caused the deaths of several unvaccinated children in the US. Europe also saw a 30-fold increase in measles cases in 2023, leading to 21,000 hospitalizations and five deaths, according to the World Health Organization. These outbreaks have been directly linked to rampant misinformation, creating public mistrust of a vaccine that's been used safely for decades. The resulting deaths were entirely preventable.
30-87% of the health information posted on social media platforms is false, according to a systematic review of 69 studies published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Researchers found the most common topics for health misinformation were related to:
This harmful information is deliberately created to "promote certain products in order to increase company profits, as well as to benefit certain ideological positions or contradict health evidence," warns Victor Suarez-Lledo, the study's lead author and PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Cadiz.
Beyond just health consequences, people who fall victim to financial misinformation can suffer severe losses of a different sort. Americans lost 3.8 billion dollars to investment scams in 2022 alone, according to the Federal Trade Commission. 1.2 billion of those losses involved people who were roped into these scams on social media.
Political misinformation may be the most sinister form of all because it aims to undermine the stability of our society and can even lead to radicalization and violence.
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"We continue to see threat actors exploit social media to influence their intended targets. For example, state actors leverage it as a means to spread disinformation, divide public opinion, and generally interfere in healthy public debate and discourse. Non-state actors, meanwhile, use it as a means to spread conspiracy theories and inspire violent extremist actions," said the Director of Canada's Security Intelligence Service, in a 2023 public report.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation also released several public statements in November, 2024 warning about misinformation campaigns, "designed to mislead the American public and undermine confidence in the election process and outcomes."
Misinformation spreads far more easily than the truth on social media, in part because, without the need for research or fact-checking, it can be pumped out very quickly. Some of this harmful information is deliberately spread by bots (automated software programs designed to post content and interact with users), but human users are just as guilty. A 2018 study out of MIT found that false information was 70% more likely to be shared by human users on Twitter, and reached people 6 times faster than the truth. The researchers theorize this is partly because the eye-catching novelty of fake headlines makes them so very tempting to share.
These false claims have real-world consequences. Regardless of our political affiliations, we can (and should) all get better at spotting misinformation on our social media feeds and take steps not to spread it.
As misinformation has exploded across social media, so has interest in how to understand and combat it. Researchers and policymakers want to know who is most susceptible to false information so that interventions like education campaigns can be targeted where they are most needed. There are heaps of research studies into the psychology of misinformation, but until recently, there was not a single validated tool that could be used to compare results across different studies.
Enter Rakoen Maertens, PhD, from the University of Cambridge's Department of Psychology and lead author of the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST). The test is administered as a 20-point quiz that measures a person's ability to differentiate real news headlines from fake ones.
"When I started doing research on the psychology of misinformation in 2018, I was surprised to see that researchers and practitioners kept creating new tests and measures of misinformation susceptibility with no or very limited validation. This means that researchers could not really be sure of what exactly they were measuring, and they might have been measuring different things with each test," says Maertens.
Along with Friedrich Götz, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia with expertise in test development, Maertens decided to develop the MIST to solve this problem.
Maertens and his team created the test in 2023 using AI to generate 300 fake headlines according to set criteria. An additional 100+ real headlines were chosen from 8 non-partisan news sources, including outlets like Reuters, the World Press Review, Africa Check, and the Associated Press, chosen for their diversity, minimal bias, and high scores for factual reporting.
The initial pool of over 400 headlines was refined down to a total of 20 selections over multiple rounds of expert review and psychometric testing. To get to the final version, over 8,500 participants from the US and UK took part in three large studies to confirm the test's reliability and structure.
The final version asks participants to rate 20 news headlines -- 10 real and 10 fake -- presented in a randomized order. The test evaluates not just accuracy in detecting real and fake news, but also tendencies toward excessive skepticism (distrust) or gullibility (naïvité).
If you're curious, you can take the test here and try to beat my score of 19/20. Some readers have found that the test can take a few minutes to load.
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In April, 2023, the UK-based polling and analytics firm YouGov administered the MIST to 1,516 Americans and gathered data about their political leanings, online habits and usual news sources. The average score was 13/20, meaning that overall, participants correctly classified the headlines about 65% of the time.
According to the poll, these groups were least able to differentiate fake headlines from real ones: younger adults.
Adults aged 18-29 had the worst scores of all age categories. Only 11% of participants in this age group scored high (correctly classifying at least 17 out of 20 headlines), while 36% scored low (10 or fewer correct answers). Adults aged 30-44 scored only slightly better, with 18% scoring high and 37% scoring low.
It was adults 65 and older that scored the best. 36% earned a high score and only 9% scored low. This result challenges the popular idea that older adults are more susceptible to misinformation because they are assumed to be less media savvy than younger generations.
What explains this? The authors theorize that it's due to where different age groups get their news. The poll found that people who got most of their news from traditional "legacy" sources like Associated Press and National Public Radio were better at detecting misinformation. Older people were more likely to get their news from legacy media sources, which tend to have higher standards for editorial oversight and fact-checking than social media.
By contrast, younger adults were more likely to get most of their news from social media sites such as TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, and those who tended to rely on these sources for news generally scored lower on the test. "Younger people increasingly turn to social media to find out about the world, but these channels are awash with misinformation," said Maertens in an interview about the MIST.
This suggests that the quality of your usual news sources affects how well you can detect misinformation.
The chronically online: The longer a person spent online for fun each day, the more susceptible they were to misinformation, according to the YouGov poll.
At the two extremes, of people who spent 9 hours or more online per day, only 15% got a high score on the test (at least 17 out of 20 correct answers), and 30% got a low score (10 or fewer). These scores were flipped in people who spent 2 hours or less per day online: 30% got a high score, and 17% scored low.
The scores of those who spent 5-7 hours per day online fell in between. It's also worth noting that younger participants (who scored worse on the MIST) tended to spend more time online than older participants (who scored better), further suggesting that there's an association between the number of hours we spend online each day and our ability to discern fake headlines.
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Republicans: Participants who identified as Republicans scored worse on the MIST than those who identified as Democrats. This information is not meant to antagonize right-leaning readers, but rather to explore the possible reasons for this, because it is not an isolated finding. A 2024 meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America analyzed the results of 31 US-based experiments into misinformation susceptibility. Just like the MIST, this meta-analysis found that Republicans were less able than Democrats to differentiate true from false news.
Citing several other studies into media bias and fake news, the authors of the meta-analysis offered the following explanation: "studies show that Republican politicians are making fewer evidence-based statements and more belief-based statements; that misinformation tends to favor more Republican (conservative) positions, whereas true news tends to favor more Democratic (liberal) positions, thereby skewing perceptions of truth; and that Republicans are also more exposed to -- and share more -- articles from unreliable websites."
In other words, the meta-analysis found that right-leaning Americans tend to be worse at discerning false headlines because they are exposed to more fake news than left-leaning Americans.
It should be noted that both the YouGov poll and the meta-analysis looked at Americans specifically; however, a separate study applied the MIST to 66,242 individuals in 24 countries with similar findings for age and conservative political leanings. The global study also noted differences in fake news discernment based on education level and gender, which were not specifically analyzed in the US-based studies.
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Misinformation can be tricky to spot, often by design. Luckily, there are some simple ways to sharpen your media savvy and become harder to fool:
I might also suggest we should all get better at holding politicians to account. Regardless of where we live or our political leanings, we should not accept having our votes courted through falsehoods.
Consider pushing back with a quick email or phone call to a party or politician if you catch them spreading misinformation. Ultimately, it's on all of us to stay sharp-eyed out there, raise our information standards, and learn to question what's presented to us online.
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