Poster #89 - How source group membership and risk of harm influence adolescents’ trust in COVID-19 misinformation

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Adolescents without underlying conditions face a reduced risk of developing severe symptoms from COVID-19, but can still facilitate transmission of the virus (Irfan et al., 2021) and are often implicated as being most likely to breach guidelines (Andrews et al., 2020). This raises the question of whether being at risk of COVID-19 would influence adolescents’ perception of information about COVID-19. However, it is likely that adolescents encounter vast misinformation about COVID-19, due to its prevalence on social media (Cinelli et al., 2020), where majority of teenagers get their information (Ofcom, 2022). When adolescents assess the credibility of information, they consider the source of the content more than its truthfulness, and how trustworthy they perceive the information to be (Herrero-Diz et al., 2020). Sharing group membership with the source of information can result in an ingroup bias amongst adolescents, where ingroup sources of misinformation are favoured to outgroup sources (Farooq et al., 2022). It is therefore important to explore adolescents’ ingroup bias when receiving information about COVID-19 from different sources.
The present study investigated whether risk of personal harm from COVID-19 and group membership of the source of COVID-19 misinformation would influence adolescents’ reported trust in the misinformation and its source. In this study, 203 adolescents (Mage = 15.53, SD = 1.08; 71 girls) were recruited from schools in the United Kingdom and took part in an online questionnaire. Participants were asked to imagine a new variant of COVID-19, the ‘Omega’ variant, had been discovered. We manipulated the risk of harm from this variant (harmful to adolescents vs not harmful) before presenting participants with misinformation about the spread of the variant, for which we manipulated the source (same-age peer vs adult). We then asked participants to report how trustworthy they found the source of the misinformation and their information, and asked for their open-ended justifications. We also measured their self-reported engagement in information-scrutinising behaviour.
Results showed that participants perceived the misinformation source to be more trustworthy when they were told the new variant was harmful for teenagers – regardless of whether the source was a peer or an adult. Participants who claimed the source was trustworthy were more likely to reference their relationship to the source (e.g., friend), and were also low on self-reported engagement in information-scrutinising behaviours. Meanwhile, participants who perceived the source as not being trustworthy were more likely to reference the source’s lack of credentials and scrutinised the credibility of the source’s information, and were high on self-reported engagement in information-scrutinising behaviours.
This research highlights the role that risk of personal harm from COVID-19 can have on adolescents’ perceptions of trustworthy sources of COVID-19 information – even when it is misinformation. Their open-ended justifications demonstrated how perceived familiarity with the misinformation source influences their trustworthiness evaluations, and could compromise their ability to effectively scrutinise information, especially if they do not engage in such behaviours. This reinforces a need for educating adolescents about the importance of getting their information from credible sources and practising information scrutiny, particularly during public health crises.

Authors

• Aqsa Farooq, University Of Exeter
  Presenting Author

• Luke McGuire, University Of Exeter

• Adam Rutland, University Of Exeter