Closing the Motivation Gap: Incentives Enhance Visual Misinformation Discernment and Verification
For designers of digital media literacy interventions, this work identifies which incentive mechanisms and types are most effective for improving short- and long-term visual misinformation detection.
This study tested whether adding incentives (symbolic vs. monetary, task- vs. result-based) to a media literacy intervention improves visual misinformation discernment and verification behavior. Task-based monetary incentives boosted short-term verification and discernment, while result-based incentives sustained discernment accuracy over time.
Cheapfakes, or real images presented misleadingly or in unrelated contexts, are an increasingly prominent form of visual misinformation. While media literacy interventions can enhance individuals' ability to detect such content, motivational barriers often hinder the adoption of image verification. This study examines whether incorporating different mechanisms and types of incentives into a digital media literacy intervention improves visual misinformation discernment and image verification behavior, both immediately and over time. We conducted a pre-registered two-wave between-subjects online experiment (N = 1,421) on a professionally designed social media platform. The study used a 2 (Incentive Type: symbolic vs. monetary) x 2 (Incentive Mechanism: task- vs. result-based) factorial design with additional control groups. Results show that task-based incentives, particularly monetary ones, were most effective at initiating image verification behaviors, namely reverse image search, and boosting short-term discernment, whereas result-based incentives were more effective in sustaining discernment accuracy. These findings suggest that both the mechanism and the type of incentives play a critical role in shaping the short- and long-term effectiveness of media literacy interventions, highlighting the value of multi-phased incentive strategies for combating visual misinformation in digital environments.