By Anna Harvey, President, Social Science Research Council
The World Health Organization defines an infodemic as the spread of “false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response.” The U.S. Office of the Surgeon General has declared health misinformation to be a significant public health challenge. In a December 20, 2021, interview on PBS NewsHour, outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins expressed regret over the U.S. response to COVID-19 misinformation: "Maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior. I never imagined a year ago, when those vaccines were just proving to be fantastically safe and effective, that we would still have 60 million people who had not taken advantage of them because of misinformation and disinformation that somehow dominated all of the ways in which people were getting their answers."
Yet, despite widespread concern about the potential impacts of mis- and disinformation on health outcomes, we know little about the magnitudes of those impacts nor about their differential effects across sociodemographic groups. We also know little about cost-effective interventions that may mitigate those impacts and increase the spread and uptake of accurate health information.