Can Incentives for Sharing True Information Affect Discernment? Results from an Online Experiment in India
Abstract
In the era of social media, when misinformation is rampant, discerning truth from false information is becoming increasingly challenging. This articles investigates the impact of financial incentives on individuals’ discernment of misinformation in urban India. To account for overall sharing propensity and recent debates around measurement of effectiveness of interventions to combat misinformation, this article used additive and multiplicative measures of discernment. Overall, results showed that sharing of true information did not differ with the type of incentive. Descriptively, financial incentives increased additive discernment on average by 0.44 posts shared and were 1.17 times more likely to discern between true and false information. Both additive and multiplicative discernment did not differ significantly with financial incentives, except in the case of plausible posts. Heterogeneous treatment effects show that the impact of financial incentives is primarily on increasing sharing of plausible posts among those who clicked “read more,” had less than undergraduate-level education, resided in urban areas, and were unemployed. Implications for policy and future work around testing financial incentives for curbing the spread of misinformation online are discussed.
