The Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA) has chosen a sweeping study led by Cornell psychology researchers David Rand and Gordon Pennycook as its publication of the year.
"Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents," published in Nature Human Behavior, was selected as one of two papers for this year's publication award. Rand, the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor and professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science; professor of marketing in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), and Pennycook, associate professor of psychology and Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow (A&S) are the co-corresponding authors.
The award was announced June 8 at the BSPA 2026 conference at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University.
“The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions,” the authors wrote in the paper. To address this problem, they conducted an experiment in 16 countries across six continents with nearly 35,000 participants, focused on misinformation about COVID-19.
Overall, the study found that the reasons people fall for misinformation and the ways to fix it are similar around the world.
In every country, people who tend toward analytic thinking and are more motivated by accuracy were better at telling truth from falsehood; valuing democracy was also related to greater truth discernment. The researchers found that subtle reminders about accuracy and digital literacy can make a difference in what people choose to share online.
Past research on misinformation has focused on the West, and on the U.S. in particular, Pennycook said.
“This is a problem because misinformation is inherently culturally constrained,” he said. “The COVID pandemic afforded a unique opportunity to do a genuine cross-cultural comparison in the context of misinformation: The same truths and falsehoods were relevant across the globe.”
The global experiments described in this paper allowed the researchers to validate major findings from earlier, U.S.-focused work, finding that the factors that predict susceptibility to misinformation in the U.S. were also predictive around the world – and the same with interventions.
In the next phase of their research, Rand and Pennycook are using artificial intelligencto produce large and durable effects on belief in falsehoods. Their work using large language models to debunk false conspiracies and other types of misconceptions won the 2026 Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
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