Children's detection of online misinformation

Adults' ability to detect online misinformation is improved by cognitive reflection and targeted instruction. Is the same true for children, who are also on the internet and may also be exposed to online misinformation? We explored this question by asking children aged 4 to 12 (N = 135, 54 % female, 31 % white) to judge the veracity of news stories that had circulated on the internet, some real and some fake. We compared their differentiation of fake news from real news to their performance on a developmental version of the Cognitive Reflection Test, the CRT-D. We also administered a brief tutorial encouraging children to scrutinize the plausibility of a story's content or the credibility of its source. Children's differentiation of fake news from real news was strongly correlated with their CRT-D scores but did not improve with instruction; rather, instruction made children more skeptical of all news. A comparison group of adults (N = 117) demonstrated similar findings with the exception that instruction improved adults' differentiation of fake news from real news for those who received source-based instruction. These findings indicate that the evaluation of online news is aided by cognitive reflection from the start and that knowledge of news sources, and news production more generally, may be critical for developing adult-level competencies at detecting online misinformation.