Research has shown that laypeople tend to rely on their own evaluations when encountering scientific text information that is easy to comprehend. This easiness effect of science popularization leaves them vulnerable to uncritically accepting misinformation presented in a simplified manner. The present study investigated whether warnings of…

Past research has shown that readers often fail to notice conflicts in text. In our present study we investigated whether accessing information from multiple documents instead of a single document might alleviate this problem by motivating readers to integrate information. We further tested whether this effect would be moderated by source…

The present study investigated how dealing with conflicting versus consistent medical information on the Web impacts on topic-specific and medicine-related epistemic beliefs as well as aspects of health decision making. One hundred mostly female university students were randomly assigned to three groups. Two intervention groups searched the Web…