This study examines the challenge of correcting entrenched health misperceptions among older adults. Given that conventional fact-checking often fails to correct health misperceptions in older adults, we test whether alternative interventions including counterspeech and awareness training can better promote belief correction.
Two randomized controlled trials were conducted via the Tencent Questionnaire platform. Experiment 1 evaluated a conventional fact-checking intervention, while Experiment 2 focused on a screened belief-perseverant subgroup with high belief perseverance, comparing counterspeech and awareness training against repeated fact-checking.
Conventional fact-checking corrected only a small portion of pre-existing health misperceptions in our sample, with about 11% of participants explicitly rejecting the false health claim. Among those whose misperceptions persisted after initial exposure, counterspeech yielded a substantially higher short-term correction rate (46.15%) than repeated fact-checking, whereas awareness training showed a higher, though non-significant, short-term correction rate (36.84%).
Moving beyond conventional metrics of belief reduction, this study advances health misperception research by evaluating discrete state transitions from non-rejection (endorsement or neutrality) to explicit rejection. Furthermore, it demonstrates that for belief-perseverant older adults, alternative strategies like counterspeech and awareness training outperform repeated fact-checking, providing a more effective framework for follow-up interventions.
