Toby Prike

University of Adelaide · School of Psychology

Making misleading statements may benefit a politician, for example, during an election campaign. However, there are potentially also negative consequences; political misinformation can taint democratic debate, voters may be misled into forming false beliefs, and being fact‐checked may damage a politician's reputation. Previous research has found th...

Background Agent-based modelling provides an appealing methodological choice for simulating human behaviour and decisions. The currently dominant approaches based on static transition rates or unverified assumptions are restrictive, and could be enhanced with insights from cognitive experiments on actual decision making. Here, one common concern is...

Making misleading statements may benefit a politician, for example during an election campaign. However, there are potentially also negative consequences; political misinformation can taint democratic debate, voters may be misled into forming false beliefs, and being fact-checked may damage a politician’s reputation. Previous research has found tha...

Misinformation often continues to influence people’s reasoning even after it has been corrected. Therefore, an important aim of applied cognition research is to identify effective measures to counter misinformation. One frequently recommended but hitherto insufficiently tested strategy is source discreditation, that is, attacking the credibility of...

Social simulation studies are complex. They typically combine various data sources and hypotheses about the system’s mechanisms that are integrated by intertwined processes of model building, simulation experiment execution and analysis. Various documentation approaches exist to increase the transparency and traceability of complex social simulatio...

Nudge-based misinformation interventions are presented as cheap and effective ways to reduce the spread of misinformation online. However, despite online information environments typically containing relatively low volumes of misinformation, most studies testing the effectiveness of nudge interventions present equal proportions of true and false in...

Misinformation has become a prescient issue in public and academic domains. One pernicious aspect of misinformation is that it can persistently influence people’s judgements after clear and credible correction—a phenomenon dubbed the continued influence effect. There has been speculation that age may affect people’s susceptibility to the continued...

Misinformation on social media is a pervasive challenge. In this study (N = 415) a social-media simulation was used to test two potential interventions for countering misinformation: a credibility badge and a social norm. The credibility badge was implemented by associating accounts, including participants’, with a credibility score. Participants’...

Misinformation often continues to influence people’s reasoning even after it has been corrected. Therefore, an important aim of applied cognition research is to identify effective measures to counter misinformation. One frequently recommended but hitherto insufficiently tested strategy is source discreditation, that is, attacking the credibility of...

Background In this paper, we explore the potential of games to collect empirical data for informing agent-based simulation models of migration. To examine the usefulness of game-based approaches, we conducted a simple, yet carefully designed psychological experiment. Methods In a preregistered study, we used a novel, immersive experimental setting...

There is growing evidence that intellectual humility is associated with reduced misinformation susceptibility. However, a key aspect of intellectual humility is awareness of one’s own limitations, which may increase cautious responding (e.g., tendency to label headlines false or withhold responses, regardless of headline veracity or response accura...

Nudge-based misinformation interventions are presented as cheap and effective ways to reduce the spread of misinformation online. However, despite online information environments typically containing low volumes of misinformation, most studies testing the effectiveness of nudge interventions present equal proportions of true and false information....

Background Agent-based modelling provides an appealing methodological choice for simulating human behaviour and decisions. The currently dominant approaches based on static transition rates or unverified assumptions are restrictive, and could be enhanced with insights from cognitive experiments on actual decision making. Here, one common concern is...

Given the potential negative impact reliance on misinformation can have, substantial effort has gone into understanding the factors that influence misinformation belief and propagation. However, despite the rise of social media often being cited as a fundamental driver of misinformation exposure and false beliefs, how people process misinformation...

Corrections are a frequently used and effective tool for countering misinformation. However, concerns have been raised that corrections may introduce false claims to new audiences when the misinformation is novel. This is because boosting the familiarity of a claim can increase belief in that claim, and thus exposing new audiences to novel misinfor...

p>Social simulation studies are complex. They typically combine various sources of data and hypotheses, that are integrated by intertwined processes of model building, simulation experiment execution, and analysis. Various documentation approaches exist to support the transparency and traceability of complex social simulation studies. In particular...

Misinformation on social media is a pervasive challenge. In this study (N = 415) a social-media simulation was used to test two potential interventions for countering misinformation: a credibility badge and a social norm. The credibility badge was implemented by associating accounts, including participants’, with a credibility score. Participants’...

Background: Agent-based modelling provides an appealing methodological choice for simulating human behaviour and decisions. The currently-dominant approaches based on static transition rates or unverified assumptions are restrictive, and could be enhanced with insights from cognitive experiments on actual decision making. Here, one common concern i...

In recent years, the UK has become divided along two key dimensions: party affiliation and Brexit position. We explored how division along these two dimensions interacts with the correction of political misinformation. Participants saw accurate and inaccurate statements (either balanced or mostly inaccurate) from two politicians from opposing parti...

Corrections are a frequently used and effective tool for countering misinformation. However, concerns have been raised that corrections may introduce false claims to new audiences when the misinformation is novel. This is because boosting the familiarity of a claim can increase belief in that claim, and thus exposing new audiences to novel misinfor...

In recent years the United Kingdom has become divided along two key dimensions, party affiliation and Brexit position. We explored how division along these two dimensions interacts with the correction of political misinformation. Participants saw accurate and inaccurate statements (either balanced or mostly inaccurate) from two politicians from opp...

Misinformation can have noxious impacts on cognition, fostering the formation of false beliefs, retroactively distorting memory for events, and influencing reasoning and decision-making even after it has been credibly corrected. Researchers investigating the impacts of real-world misinformation are therefore faced with an ethical issue: they must c...

Given the negative impact reliance on misinformation can have on individuals and society, substantial effort has gone into understanding the factors that influence misinformation belief and propagation. However, despite the rise of social media often being cited as a fundamental driver of misinformation exposure and false beliefs, how people proces...

p>Social simulation studies are complex, because they typically combine various sources of data and hypotheses, that are integrated by intertwined processes, of model building, simulation experiment execution, and analysis. Various documentation approaches exist that support transparency and traceability of social simulation studies. The exploitati...

p>Social simulation studies are complex, because they typically combine various sources of data and hypotheses, that are integrated by intertwined processes, of model building, simulation experiment execution, and analysis. Various documentation approaches exist that support transparency and traceability of social simulation studies. The exploitati...

Misinformation can have noxious impacts on cognition, fostering formation of false beliefs, retroactively distorting memory for events, and influencing reasoning and decision making even after it has been credibly corrected. Researchers investigating the impacts of real-world misinformation are therefore faced with an ethical issue: they must consi...

In a pre-registered experiment, we presented participants with information about the safety of traveling during a deadly pandemic and during a migration trip using five different sources (a news article, a family member, an official organization, someone with personal experience, and the travel organizer) and four different verbal descriptions of t...

Recent years have seen large changes to research practices within psychology and a variety of other empirical fields in response to the discovery (or rediscovery) of the pervasiveness and potential impact of questionable research practices, coupled with well-publicised failures to replicate published findings. In response to this, and as part of a...

In this chapter, we summarise the scientific and policy implications of the Bayesian model-based approach, starting from an evaluation of its possible advantages, limitations, and potential to influence further scientific developments, policy and practice. We focus here specifically on the role of limits of knowledge and reducible (epistemic), as w...

This chapter outlines the role that individual-level empirical evidence gathered from psychological experiments and surveys can play in informing agent-based models, and the model-based approach more broadly. To begin with, we provide an overview of the way that this empirical evidence can be used to inform agent-based models. Additionally, we prov...

This open access book presents a ground-breaking approach to developing micro-foundations for demography and migration studies. It offers a unique and novel methodology for creating empirically grounded agent-based models of international migration – one of the most uncertain population processes and a top-priority policy area. The book discusses i...

Migration decisions are taken in the context of personal needs and desires while facing uncertainty regarding outcomes of alternative behavioral options. Information about the future and its opportunities is incomplete, and whether migration turns out as a personal success or failure depends mostly on circumstances that are ex ante unknown and ex p...

A poor understanding of probability may lead people to misinterpret every day coincidences and form anomalistic (e.g., paranormal) beliefs. We investigated the relationship between anomalistic belief (including type of belief) and misperception of chance and the base rate fallacy across both anomalistic and control (i.e., neutral) contexts. Greater...

Motivated rejection of science refers to the tendency of people with higher reasoning ability to correctly interpret evidence for neutral topics but inaccurately interpret evidence that disagrees with a core belief. The seminal paradigm tested participants on a single trial in one of three contexts; neutral, congruent with political beliefs, or inc...

Biases in the assessment and integration of evidence are likely contributors to anomalistic (e.g., paranormal, extra-terrestrial) beliefs because of the non-evidence based nature of these beliefs. However, little research has examined the relationship between anomalistic beliefs and evidence integration biases. The current study addressed this gap...

A growing body of research has shown people who hold anomalistic (e.g., paranormal) beliefs may differ from nonbelievers in their propensity to make probabilistic reasoning errors. The current study explored the relationship between these beliefs and performance through the development of a new measure of anomalistic belief, called the Anomalistic...

Previous studies have shown that punishing people through a large penalty for volunteering incorrect information typically leads them to withhold more information (metacognitive response bias), but it does not appear to influence their ability to distinguish between their own correct and incorrect answers (metacognitive accuracy discrimination). Th...

A growing body of research has shown that context manipulations can have little or no impact on accuracy performance, yet still significantly influence metacognitive performance. For example, participants in a test-list context paradigm study one list of words with a medium levels-of-processing task and a second word list with either a shallow or d...