Data: The Contributions of Childhood Vaccination Misconceptions to the Evaluation and Sharing of Information from Multiple Internet Texts

The results indicate that college student readers appeared to be insensitive to a source availability manipulation. However, their preexisting beliefs, specifically in terms of their misconceptions regarding childhood vaccinations, appeared to be detrimental to their online information sharing proclivities.

In particular, readers with misconceptions about childhood vaccinations were more likely to include inaccurate concepts when writing an essay to share information with a friend. Additionally, readers with misconceptions were less able to distinguish more from less credible information, as evidenced by their inability to appropriately rank-order the Internet in terms of reliability. The patterns suggest that readers with misconception-based beliefs may be at risk for misinforming others after reading multiple conflicting texts on the Internet.