Briony Swire-Thompson
· Cognitive Psychologist and Director of the Psychology of Misinformation LabNortheastern University · Psychology
Active 2018–2026
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About
Briony Swire-Thompson is a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Psychology of Misinformation Lab. Her research investigates what drives belief in inaccurate information, why people refrain from belief change in the face of good corrective evidence, and how corrections can be designed to maximize impact. She is affiliated with the Northeastern University's Political Science Department and the Network Science Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, she was at the University of Western Australia’s Cognitive Science Laboratories and was a Fulbright scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently funded by the National Cancer Institute to study cancer misinformation.
Selected publications
Cancer Misinformation and Harmful Information on Facebook and Other Social Media: A Brief Report
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute · 2021-07-14 · 217 citations
articleOpen accessThere are few data on the quality of cancer treatment information available on social media. Here, we quantify the accuracy of cancer treatment information on social media and its potential for harm. Two cancer experts reviewed 50 of the most popular social media articles on each of the 4 most common cancers. The proportion of misinformation and potential for harm were reported for all 200 articles and their association with the number of social media engagements using a 2-sample Wilcoxon rank-s…
Supersharers of fake news on Twitter
Science · 2024-05-30 · 51 citations
articleOpen accessGovernments may have the capacity to flood social media with fake news, but little is known about the use of flooding by ordinary voters. In this work, we identify 2107 registered US voters who account for 80% of the fake news shared on Twitter during the 2020 US presidential election by an entire panel of 664,391 voters. We found that supersharers were important members of the network, reaching a sizable 5.2% of registered voters on the platform. Supersharers had a significant overrepresentatio…
American Psychologist · 2025-10-20 · 26 citations
articleOpen accessThere is widespread concern that misinformation poses dangerous risks to health, well-being, and civic life. Despite a growing body of research on the topic, significant questions remain about the psychological factors that render people susceptible to misinformation, the extent to which it affects real-world behavior, how it spreads online and offline, and intervention strategies that counter and correct misinformation effectively. This report reviews the best available psychological science re…
Don’t believe them! Reducing misinformation influence through source discreditation
Cognitive Research Principles and Implications · 2024-08-26 · 12 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorMisinformation often continues to influence people's reasoning even after it has been corrected. Therefore, an important aim of applied cognition research is to identify effective measures to counter misinformation. One frequently recommended but hitherto insufficiently tested strategy is source discreditation, that is, attacking the credibility of a misinformation source. In two experiments, we tested whether immediate source discreditation could reduce people's subsequent reliance on fictional…
Countering AI-generated misinformation with pre-emptive source discreditation and debunking
Royal Society Open Science · 2025-06-01 · 10 citations
articleOpen accessDespite widespread concerns over AI-generated misinformation, its impact on people’s reasoning and the effectiveness of countermeasures remain unclear. This study examined whether a pre-emptive, source-focused inoculation—designed to lower trust in AI-generated information—could reduce its influence on reasoning. This approach was compared with a retroactive, content-focused debunking, as well as a simple disclaimer that AI-generated information may be misleading, as often seen on real-world pla…
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