Does School Debating Reduce Vulnerability to Misinformation? A Field Experiment in Poland

The idea that debating enhances political knowledge and critical thinking has been entertained by scholars of democracy for a long time. Given recent concern about a crisis of misinformation, we explore the idea that debating makes people less vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy thinking. In a field experiment, we recruited high school students in 18 schools in Poland (n=430) and assigned them to either a debate workshop or a control condition. Before and after the workshop period, we asked students to indicate their belief in a set of news headlines (half of which were true, half false) and measured their degree of conspiratorial thinking. We find that debating increases, by a small amount, the accuracy of beliefs regarding news headlines, while reducing conspiracy thinking. These findings point to a great potential of school debating, which occurs naturally in many educational contexts and is easily scalable.