Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Selective avoidance of facts that are uncongenial to preexisting false beliefs is a biased click behavior that decreases the effect of correcting misinformation. This study examined the strength of this avoidance tendency and whether interventions could reduce it. In a preregistered experiment with 1,203 participants, we compared two different types of interventions: an intervention with instruction that directly calls for reflection via text (instruction intervention); an intervention with a ranking-biased order that induces people to click on what they easily see and vice versa (ranking-biased intervention). The results showed no significant effect of the instruction intervention. However, ranking-biased intervention showed preventive outcomes regarding participants’ selective avoidance behaviors and promoted clicking on links to uncongenial facts. The ranking-biased intervention was effective for participants with high reflexiveness as well as for participants with low reflexiveness. We discuss the implication of interaction between the interventions and click behavior based on cognitive characteristics.