Human-Centered Solutions to Mitigating Misinformation
(A2026-133774)

AUTHORS

Giandomenico Di Domenico, Cardiff University; Gita Johar, Columbia University; Kristen Lane, Columbia Business School; Yu Ding, Stanford University; Gizem Ceylan, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University; Marta Pizzetti, emLyon Business School

ABSTRACT

Misinformation remains one of the most pressing challenges for consumers, brands, and public institutions (World Economic Forum, 2024). Although a wide range of platform-based interventions has been proposed to address misinformation (Kozyreva et al., 2024), their real-world impact is often constrained by issues of scalability, implementation costs, and limited durability. In contrast, human-centered interventions that leverage individuals’ goals, cognitive processes, and linguistic understanding offer a more sustainable and scalable route to strengthening misinformation resilience. This Special Session presents four research papers that develop and test human-centered interventions grounded in cognitive and social psychology to reduce misinformation engagement, belief, and spread.Two of the papers (Papers 1 and 4) include live interactive demonstrations of their intervention technologies, underscoring the session’s innovative format and diversity of practical, scalable approaches to misinformation mitigation. The first paper (Lane, Fan & Yang) introduces FeedFrame, a browser extension that reframes users’ goals when browsing social media. Across experiments, the authors show that prompting users to adopt an accuracy-focused browsing mode reduces engagement with low-quality content, demonstrating that goal activation is a powerful lever for misinformation mitigation. The second paper (Ding & Johar) presents a cognitively distanced, crowd-based fact-checking method that relies on similarity judgments rather than direct truth assessments. Across five studies, the authors show that similarity ratings avoid ideological distortion, improve predictive accuracy, and scale efficiently, offering a reliable alternative for large-scale misinformation evaluation. The third paper (Ceylan, Schoenmueller, & Johar) conducts a large cross-platform, cross-country analysis of linguistic and structural features that shape engagement with fact-checking posts. The authors identify psychological and stylistic cues that increase diffusion of corrections, providing actionable guidelines for more effective fact-checking communication. The final paper (Di Domenico et al.) tests a dual-mode intervention delivered through CRITHINK, a web-based app combining source credibility labels with media literacy tips. Experimental evidence reveals that source credibility and the integrated intervention markedly improve accuracy and credibility discernment of news. Together, the four projects provide a coherent, people-centered roadmap for designing, testing, and deploying interventions that build resilience to misinformation.