Psychological Underpinnings of Disinformation Countermeasures: A Systematic Scoping Review

There has been a substantial scholarly effort to (a) investigate the psychological underpinnings of disinformation susceptibility, and (b) develop interventions that hamper their credibility and spread. However, a systematic review of intervention research is still lacking. We conducted a systematic scoping review of psychological interventions to counteract disinformation (N = 176) and categorized boosting, inoculation, identity management, nudging, and fact-checking interventions. We examined how these interventions are theoretically derived from the two most prominent psychological accounts for disinformation susceptibility: classical and motivated reasoning. Most studies focused on fact-checking interventions, have been poorly linked to basic psychological theory and are not geared towards reducing motivated reasoning. Based on our review, we outline future avenues for research on psychological countermeasures against disinformation.