A recent experimental study conducted by LIRNEasia in Sri Lanka explored people’s ability to accurately assess the truthfulness of information — and found that this ability varies significantly depending on the topic. The study focused on three types of information: climate, economic, and ethno-religious issues.
Participants were asked to classify 12 climate-related cue cards as true, mostly true, mostly false, or false. This classification process was carried out in three phases over the course of the study.
In the first phase (baseline evaluation), participants arrived at the test center and were asked to classify 40 cue cards, which included the climate-related cards.
Next, participants were randomly assigned to one of five interventions: in-person training, an educational video, an e-game, exposure to a fact-checking WhatsApp group, or a fact-checking website.
Figure 1: Experimental study participants are assigned to interventions
After completing their assigned intervention (immediate post-evaluation phase), participants classified a new set of 40 cue cards.
Finally, two weeks later (14-day post-evaluation phase), participants completed a third round of classification at home using another new set of cards.
Participants received higher scores for correctly classifying the cue cards — for instance, marking true cards as true and false cards as false. Scores ranged from a minimum of 20 to a maximum of 120. Improvements were measured in two ways: short-term (baseline to immediate post-evaluation) and medium-term (baseline to the 14-day post-evaluation).
Interestingly, results revealed noticeable differences in participants’ ability to classify information, depending on the topic. Participants’ ability to accurately assess climate-related information was considerably lower than their ability to evaluate economic or ethno-religious content.
Figure 2: Improvement of scores by information theme
This raises an important question: Is it inherently more difficult for people to identify climate-related misinformation? The study suggests that this may indeed be the case and highlights the need for further research into why climate misinformation is particularly challenging to detect.
When results were analyzed by intervention type, none of the five approaches improved participants’ ability to accurately classify climate-related information. In fact, both short-term and medium-term improvements in climate-related information were negative.
Figure 3: Short-term and medium-term improvements for climate information
This finding challenges the widely held belief that conventional interventions are effective in combating climate misinformation. It underscores the need for innovative approaches specifically tailored to address this challenge.
In summary, LIRNEasia’s experimental study highlights that people find it especially difficult to identify climate-related misinformation — and that current intervention methods may not only be ineffective but could even have a negative impact. This critical insight points to an urgent need for new strategies to strengthen public resilience against climate misinformation in Sri Lanka.
The experimental study was conducted with 802 Sinhala news consumers in the Eastern, Southern, and Western provinces of Sri Lanka from December 2024 to January 2025.
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