Why “Do Your Own Research” Might Make Things Worse: Inside Jane Acierno’s Research on Misinformation 

             You’ve probably seen or heard the common bit of counsel, “always do your own research.” It sounds like common sense. Afterall, isn’t this a call for critical thinking, for intellectual independence? But what if that advice, delivered at the wrong moment to the wrong audience, actually makes our current misinformation landscape worse?

             This is the provocative question at the center of Jane Acierno’s dissertation work. A PhD candidate in Psychology, Acierno is part of the Network Science Institute, in the Psychology of Misinformation Lab under Dr. Briony Swire-Thompson. Acierno’s research focuses on why people believe false things and what society can actually do about it. Her path to this work began with an undergraduate fascination with moral cognition, specifically, how people form moral judgments and how those judgments shape behavior. After graduating, she joined Dr. Jonathan Phillips’ lab, where she explored questions like how moral reasoning relies on perceptions of possibility, and how people use intuitive theories of decision-making to infer what others value. It was at Northeastern, though, that her focus sharpened to see the urgent real-world stakes of misinformation, false beliefs, and the structural forces that shape both. 

Rethinking a Core Assumption 

             At the heart of Acierno’s dissertation is an examination of one of the most widely endorsed tools in the media literacy toolkit: the push to seek out trustworthy sources. In theory, encouraging people to investigate claims and consult credible information should reduce false beliefs. In practice, the story is more complicated, “The problem is that people differ in which sources they trust. In information environments containing both high- and low-quality information, encouraging individuals to pursue an open-ended search could actually increase exposure to misinformation if people choose to consult low-quality sources.” To test this, she designed an experiment in which half of the participants received a graphic media literacy prompt encouraging them to seek out trusted sources and the other half did not receive any prompt. Afterward, all participants rated their belief in a set of vaccine-related claims and completed a simulated information-seeking task in which they could consult up to 100 health provider avatars, each representing either mainstream sources like physicians or alternative sources like homeopaths, who predominantly offered accurate or inaccurate information, respectively. Participants then re-rated their beliefs. 

             The results showed that although the media literacy intervention did not shape information seeking or beliefs, what did matter was the searching itself; consulting high-quality sources improved accuracy, while consulting low-quality sources decreased it, and the damage was especially pronounced among unvaccinated participants. She also uncovered a striking trust gap; Vaccinated and unvaccinated participants expressed similar levels of distrust toward alternative sources, but vaccinated participants showed substantially higher trust in mainstream sources. That sharper distinction between source types helped explain why unvaccinated participants were more likely to seek out alternative sources in the first place.

From Message Design to Structural Change 

             For Acierno, these findings do more than provide nuance to a single intervention, they reframe the entire problem, “Belief change was being driven by  how participants navigated the information environment: Differences in trust led to selective exposure to high- or low-quality content. This realization shifts the focus from message design to the structural and trust-based factors that shape where people look for information.” The implications reach across public health communication, platform design, and institutional strategy. For public health practitioners, the takeaway is that nudging information seeking may be counterproductive when directed at audiences with low institutional trust. For social media platforms, the findings underscore the importance of design choices that actively elevate high-quality sources through clearer verification standards, visible markers of expertise, and features that foreground credibility. For institutions more broadly, Acierno’s work is a reminder that boosting accuracy requires building trust that encourages people to seek out reliable information in the first place. 

            Beyond research, Acierno credits Northeastern’s connections with the broader Boston-Cambridge academic ecosystem as a defining feature of her PhD experience. At the Network Science Institute, she works alongside scholars in psychology, political science, network science, and public health, having conversations that push her to think about misinformation not just as a cognitive puzzle, but as a problem embedded in social and technological systems. After graduation, Acierno plans to pursue a postdoctoral position, with the long-term goal of a faculty role and her own research lab. If her dissertation is any indication, the questions she’ll bring to her future career are ones the field urgently needs answers to. 

Learn more about Jane’s work at janeacierno.com. 

Photo Credit: Jane Acierno