Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Testing the Effectiveness of Social Queries

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Kate Starbird at the University of Washington and Dr. Lisa Fazio at Vanderbilt University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining information integrity.

The dissemination of information continues to outpace the ability of existing approaches to understand it, necessitating the development of approaches that can be quickly and effectively implemented. One potential new approach is responding to online information with queries that draw attention to accuracy or criteria used to judge accuracy, such as the presence of evidence or the credibility of the information’s source.

This approach is unique in that it is user-centric, flexible, and can target information that cannot be addressed through traditional methods. These queries are theorized to reduce dissemination of inaccurate information through cueing other readers to more carefully consider the accuracy of the information and communicating that it is not universally accepted.

This project will be made up of three parts: i) experimental testing of the quick application of social queries, ii) large-scale analysis to characterize user attempts to respond to information online and their outcomes, and iii) a series of tightly-controlled experiments testing the effectiveness of queries in different contexts of application. The results of this work will be used to develop a set of practical guidelines for implementing this intervention.

In addition, other contributions of this project include: i) furthering our theoretical understanding of how individuals form beliefs and decide to disseminate information in online environments, ii) a needed characterization of how users are currently responding to information with limited credibility and the outcomes of different types of corrective attempts, and iii) the development and refinement of methodological procedures for performing experimental tests of interventions on newly emergent inaccurate information.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.