The rise of misinformation on social media platforms is an extremely worrisome issue and calls for the development of interventions and strategies to combat fake news. This research investigates one potential mechanism that can help mitigate fake news: prompting users to form implementation intentions along with education. Previous research suggests that forming “if – then” plans, otherwise known as implementation intentions, is one of the best ways to facilitate behavior change. To evaluate the effectiveness of such plans, we used MTurk to conduct an experiment where we educated participants on fake news and then asked them to form implementation intentions about performing fact checking before sharing posts on social media. Participants who had received both the implementation intention intervention and the educational intervention significantly engaged more in fact checking behavior than those who did not receive any intervention as well as participants who had received only the educational intervention. This study contributes to the emerging literature on fake news by demonstrating that implementation intentions can be used in interventions to combat fake news.

社交媒体平台上错误信息的兴起是一个极其令人担忧的问题，需要制定干预措施和战略来打击假新闻。这项研究调查了一种有助于减少假新闻的潜在机制：在教育的同时促使用户形成实施意图。先前的研究表明，制定“如果-那么”计划（也称为实施意图）是促进行为改变的最佳方法之一。为了评估此类计划的有效性，我们使用 MTurk 进行了一项实验，我们对参与者进行虚假新闻教育，然后要求他们形成在社交媒体上分享帖子之前进行事实核查的实施意图。同时接受实施意向干预和教育干预的参与者比没有接受任何干预的参与者以及仅接受教育干预的参与者显着更多地参与事实核查行为。这项研究通过证明实施意图可以用于打击假新闻的干预措施，为假新闻的新兴文献做出了贡献。