Resolving Conflicting Findings in Misinformation Research: A Methodological Perspective

Misinformation research is littered with conflicting findings and scholarly debates: For example, do accuracy prompts work equally well for liberals and conservatives? Do certain aspects of personality, such as conscientiousness, affect fake news sharing? In the present research, the authors focus on the causes of these debates and how to resolve them. Moreover, the authors contribute to the specific debate regarding the role of conscientiousness in sharing fake news by re-analyzing 12 studies containing a total of 6,790 participants and 143,956 observations. The authors highlight how researchers’ methodological choices can lead to different conclusions. The authors find that conscientiousness moderates the positive effect of some, but not all, measures of ideology when predicting fake news sharing. This investigation reveals the importance of factors such as ideology measure, analytical approach, and choice of news stimuli in arriving at different conclusions. The authors thus propose a framework for identifying and mitigating the role of these factors to stimulate faster convergence in misinformation research. Finally, the authors demonstrate that a variable does not need to interact with news veracity to be important for understanding the proliferation of fake news. In doing so, this work offers a novel perspective on conceptualizing possible interventions in misinformation research.