Health misinformation: what it is, why people believe it, how to counter it

ABSTRACT

Despite growing concerns and rapidly expanding research about health misinformation, answers to some fundamental questions remain unclear. Among the open questions are the definition of health misinformation (what is health misinformation?), the psychological drivers of susceptibility to health misinformation (why do people believe it?) and effective interventions for reducing the impact of health misinformation (how to counter it?). In this in-depth review and critical analysis of the growing literature on health misinformation, we seek to answer these questions by proposing a tentative definition for health misinformation, a comprehensive psychological model of susceptibility to health misinformation, and a systematic framework for countering health misinformation, while addressing ongoing debate about the scale of the misinformation problem and the effectiveness of current interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Misinformation
• health communication
• science communication
• fake news
• fact-checking

Acknowledgements

The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).