What’s of interest? Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST) · Streamlit
Tell me more!
Please consider participating in our research study about misinformation susceptibility online.
In this study, you will be asked to rate 20 news headlines as real or fake and answer a few optional questions about your background. It should take 2-3 minutes to complete (but may take longer). All data will be kept completely anonymous as per the privacy policy below. You must be 18 years or older to participate. You can use the app without sharing your data by clicking ‘No, I do not consent’.
This study is led by Dr Rakoen Maertens (rm938@cam.ac.uk), Yara Kyrychenko (yk408@cam.ac.uk) and Professor Sander van der Linden (sv395@cam.ac.uk), Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge.
Where is it?: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/
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This was interesting, I am curious what anyone else who clicked the link thought of the test, regardless of your scores (but hey, feel free to share).
The test merely asks you to identify a headline as true or false on just the text of the headline (no other context). It was interesting to gauge if a given headline was written in a way to wrap around people’s possible pre-existing beliefs.
Okay I will brag, I got a 19/20 MIST score – " You’re more resilient to misinformation than 89% of the US population!"
Veracity Discernment: 90% (ability to accurately distinguish real news from fake news)
Real News Detection: 90% (ability to correctly identify real news)
Fake News Detection: 100% (ability to correctly identify fake news)
Distrust/Naïvité: -1 (ranges from -10 to +10, overly skeptical to overly gullible)
Your ability to recognize real and fake news is great! You might be a bit skeptical when it comes to the news.
Awwwwwww.
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Haven’t done the test yet, but this is interesting to me for lots of reasons. First off, they explicitly frame it as a ‘misinformation’ test, which primes you to be on the lookout (which you wouldn’t necessarily be in your normal life).
There’s a fascinating episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast which discusses some research which removed the “you are about to take a misinformation test” framing. I wrote about it here: Participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story
I love this test - so important in the times we live in.
I got the same score as you, Alan - 19/20, with a -1 Distrust score (likely to be a bit skeptical).
FYI this test seems to have been around earlier, it looks like YouGov did a survey and analysis based in the questions with rather telling results/analysis, also pretty early in the GenAI wave
Also a research paper published about MIST The Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST): A psychometrically validated measure of news veracity discernment | Behavior Research Methods (publicly readable)
