Digital Media Literacy Tips: Experimental Results on Sharing and Belief Discernment

Replication data from two experiments conducted by Andy Guess, published via Harvard Dataverse in 2026. The study tests the individual effects of 10 different digital media literacy tips on participants' ability to discern the accuracy of true versus false headlines and their sharing intentions. It finds that nearly all tips improved sharing discernment, while only source-related tips improved accuracy discernment.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the comparative effectiveness of different media literacy tips based on the experimental results.
• Modeling the relationship between sharing intent and belief accuracy based on the described behavioral outcomes.
• Testing theories about the mechanisms behind misinformation sharing based on the random assignment of 10 distinct tips.

Strengths

• Data supports a specific research question on unbundling media literacy tips, a noted limitation in prior work.
• Experimental design includes a pure control group and random assignment to one or more of 10 possible tips.
• Study measures two distinct outcomes: belief accuracy and sharing intent discernment.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The stimulus set used is described as having source highly diagnostic of accuracy, which may limit generalizability.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse

Collection Method

Data from two randomized experiments where participants were assigned media literacy tips.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-04 23:47:06; freshness should be verified.