What are they thinking? Exploring college students’ mental processing and decision making about COVID-19 (mis)information on social media.

In this study, we examined how 51 college students responded to incidental exposure to accurate and inaccurate COVID-19 information delivered via a simulated social media environment. Participants’ verbalizations during think-aloud protocols indicated numerous mental processes including cognition, metacognition, epistemic cognition, motivation, and emotions. Positively valanced mental processing was more often expressed with accurate COVID-19 information and negatively valanced mental processing was more often verbalized with misinformation. Negatively valanced evaluations of knowledge claims and sources predicted less engagement with COVID-19 misinformation posts. However, in many cases the relations among verbalized mental processing and behavioral responses were complex or nonobvious. For example, participants’ positive metacognition and epistemic cognition verbalizations decreased their likelihood of engaging with accurate COVID-19 information, whereas positive interest was associated with an increased likelihood of engaging with misinformation. Our findings have implications for how to accurately infer people’s beliefs and intentions from their social media behaviors and how to design interventions to help people be more active and thoughtful consumers of online information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research