Mastering critical thinking skills is strongly associated with the ability to recognize fakeness and misinformation

In today’s world of information overload, people need skills to quickly and critically evaluate online content; they must be able to consider the credibility and quality of information as well as recognize fake and misleading information. Here, we operationalize critical thinking skills into 6 measurable concepts (i.e., causation and correlation, independent data and replicates, reproducibility, credibility of sources, experimental control, and significance), and we explore whether teaching these 6 concepts enhances scientific literacy and/or resilience against fakeness (fake tweets) and misinformation. Mixed results from our study reveal that: 1) in a small group game on misinformation, critical thinking training significantly improves accuracy and speed in assessing the truthfulness of scientific information online; 2) in a large, preregistered, randomized trial, understanding and application of critical thinking skills concepts strongly correlates with participants’ ability to identify fake tweets and misinformation; however, critical thinking training with recorded videos does not enhance participants’ proficiency in detecting fakeness and misinformation. There is a need to develop innovative interventions to prepare people to respond to misinformation, which is fast-evolving. Tools to support misinformation-specific critical thinking skills have been largely unexplored, and we anticipate such tools might be a valuable contribution to help the public navigate infodemics.