Several recent meta-analyses and systematic reviews have tried to answer how well people distinguish between true and false news (Pfänder and Altay 2025), which variables are associated with that capacity (Sultan et al. 2024), and which interventions could help people improve detecting misinformation (Kozyreva et al. 2024; Sun et al. 2025). Instead of conducting a new systematic search from scratch, we base our review on the studies included in these reviews.
First, we extract all references from studies included in the reviews, identify duplicates and merge all references into a de-duplicated data frame that we will use for the screening. We then have two screening stages: A first round of screening will be based on the abstract. All articles that pass this stage will be selected for full-text analysis.
All steps of this literature review are documented.
References
Kozyreva, Anastasia, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Stefan M. Herzog, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ralph Hertwig, Ayesha Ali, et al. 2024.
“Toolbox of Individual-Level Interventions Against Online Misinformation.” Nature Human Behaviour, May.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01881-0.
Pfänder, Jan, and Sacha Altay. 2025.
“Spotting False News and Doubting True News: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of News Judgements.” Nature Human Behaviour, February, 1–12.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02086-1.
Sultan, Mubashir, Alan N. Tump, Nina Ehmann, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Ralph Hertwig, Anton Gollwitzer, and Ralf H. J. M. Kurvers. 2024.
“Susceptibility to Online Misinformation: A Systematic Meta-Analysis of Demographic and Psychological Factors.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121 (47): e2409329121.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409329121.
Sun, Xiaojun, Xuqing Bai, Bizhong Chen, Gengfeng Niu, and Peipei Mao. 2025.
“The Impact of Prebunking Interventions Against Misinformation on Discrimination Ability and Criterion: An IPD Network Meta-Analysis,” May.
https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6660774/v1.