Skip to main content
Research project

Using Learning Principles to Protect People from Fake News

Project overview

Fake news on the internet is negatively impacting both individuals and society like never before. Social media companies are involved in a game similar to whac-a mole, removing or identifying fake news soon after it appears, for it only to reappear elsewhere shortly afterwards because it has been shared. Our research aims to tackle the problem of fake news not by addressing it after-the-fact, but by training people to identify fake news when it first appears, thereby inoculating them against its influence. Relative to existing research, we achieve this aim using a novel methodology and a new “feature-utilisation” theoretical framework.

Staff

Lead researcher

Professor Philip Higham

Professor of Experimental Psychology

Research interests

  • Enhancing student learning in educational settings
  • Protecting social media users from fake news
  • Understanding the interplay of controlled and automatic influences of retrieval practice

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Back
to top