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Judging Online Health Misinformation: Effects of Cyberchondria and Age

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Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population (HCII 2023)

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Abstract

People with cyberchondria are used to excessively seeking online health information, accompanying by heightened health anxiety, so they may be frequently exposed to or engaged in online misinformation, especially during the regular COVID-19 epidemic. Meanwhile, more and more older adults access the Internet for health information, facing the risk of fraud by misinformation. This study aims to explore how people varied in cyberchondria severity discern health misinformation they encountered online, how their credibility judgments impact subsequent willingness to read further and search for more relevant information, as well as age effects regarding the two questions. An online survey was conducted among 565 younger and older adults. Respondents reported cyberchondria severity, judged the credibility of eight true and false articles involving certain diseases, and reported their intention to read further and look for more relevant information. This study mainly found that: i) Respondents with severer cyberchondria showed a worse accuracy in discerning health misinformation, because they were more likely to judge misinformation as accurate information. ii) With increased age, respondents more frequently judged misinformation as accurate information. iii) Respondents showed a higher intention to further read and search for more relevant information after reading the partial information that they perceived to be accurate (vs. inaccurate). These results indicate that people with cyberchondria and older adults may judge health misinformation as truth and search for more relevant information based on the misjudged information.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 72171030), the second Batch of 2021 MOE of PRC Industry-University Collaborative Education Program (Program No. 202102055009, Kingfar-CES “Human Factors and Ergonomics” Program), and the graduate research and innovation foundation of Chongqing, China (Grant No. CYB21041).

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  1. School of Management Science and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China

    Honglian Xiang, Jia Zhou & Mingjun Liu

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  1. Honglian Xiang
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  2. Jia Zhou
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Correspondence to Jia Zhou .

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  1. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Qin Gao

  2. Chongqing University, Chongqing, China

    Jia Zhou

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Xiang, H., Zhou, J., Liu, M. (2023). Judging Online Health Misinformation: Effects of Cyberchondria and Age. In: Gao, Q., Zhou, J. (eds) Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14042. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34866-2_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34866-2_22

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