This study investigated the impact of refutative elements in others’ comments on accepting fallacious claims about food nutrition. Four types of comments were used, two of which included refutative elements (challenging evidence and deductive process). A multiple regression analysis was conducted with 506 participants’ agreement with the fallacious claim as the dependent variable and the type of comment and their agreement before exposure to the comments as independent variables. The study also considered individual differences such as media literacy, information literacy, cognitive reflection, and interest in and familiarity with the topic. The results showed that presenting comments that challenged the deductive process significantly decreased agreement when participants had higher agreement before exposure. Further analysis of participants with high initial agreement revealed significant effects of all three comment types. A supplemental survey (n=182) suggested that the perceived negativity and usefulness of the comments influenced the participants' agreement.

The present study explores the impact of including social media messages on learning from television programs that broadcast pseudoscientific claims. Seventy-seven university students were allocated to one of three experimental conditions: viewing television content with messages supporting the claim, with opposing messages, or without any messages presented. Memory retention did not differ among the conditions. However, social media messages influenced validation of the arguments claimed in the video. The participants who watched the video with opposing messages showed significant decrease in positive attitude toward the pseudoscientific technology that claimed to be effective in the video. Additionally, the participants who watched the video with supporting messages made fewer critical comments and showed willingness to donate more to the activity using the pseudoscientific technology. The impact of including social media messages and the process of attitude change are discussed.

Exposure to Inconsistent message has been demonstrated as auseful method to alleviate belief in false rumor. However, thedata from previous research included unexplained variation inresponse to inconsistent message. Existing research alsoincluded the possibility that participants skipped out onreading and therefore they were not exposed to a message.We used an eye tracker to eliminate the possibility. Eyetracking data revealed that participants not only did not skipbut they paid more visual attention to inconsistent messagescomparing with consistent messages. Despite the overalleffectiveness of inconsistent message, some responsesshowed continued belief in rumors even after the exposure.Eye-tracking analyses demonstrated that when participantshad positive pre-belief for a rumor, more visual attention toinconsistent message predicted strengthened the belief. Wediscuss when exposure to inconsistent message does not workwell as a way for harnessing belief in false rumor.

The present study explores the impact on memory and attitude change of social media messages that are incorporated into television programs, and the interaction of such messages with the viewer’s disposition to critical thinking. Sixty university students were allocated to one of two experimental conditions and viewed television content: social media messages were included in only one condition. The results showed a significant interaction between participants’ disposition (Objectiveness) and the experimental condition: participants with higher Objectiveness scores exhibited larger changes in their attitudes. An analysis of 10 participants’ eye fixations suggested participants’ tendency to change their allocation of attention to different types of message over time. Additionally, there was a significant correlation between the tendency to focus on these messages and scores for disposition to critical thinking (Objectiveness and Logical thinking). We discuss the possible conclusions on the impact of showing social media messages and the limitations of this study.

In a typical brainstorming method, criticism must be withheld for creative ideation. We envisage a web-based system that is designed to avoid possible negative influences of, and make good use of, critical thinking to generate creative ideas. To investigate its plausibility, we developed a system in which people participate collectively in a sequence of processes including generating, criticizing, modifying, and evaluating creative ideas. Here we report the results from conducting an experiment with 238 participants to compare the critical thinking (CT) design with a criticizing phase against the brainstorming (BS) design without it. The main finding was that the CT design resulted in the generation of higher quality ideas than the BS design without sacrificing fluency with respect to response time and the number of characters.

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.