Is Information Verification Just a Matter of Intellectual Humility?

Abstract: Adolescents can be vulnerable to misinformation, facing the daily challenge of assessing false, inaccurate, or misleading news. Understanding the psychological processes contributing to this vulnerability is crucial for enhancing their information verification skills. Previous research has established a positive association between intellectual humility – the acknowledgment of the fallibility of one’s own beliefs – and the intention to verify misleading content. However, the underlying process through which it occurs remains underexplored. Intellectual humility may also be linked to moral disengagement: individuals characterized by an awareness of their own fallibility can be less inclined to rely on moral disengagement mechanisms, which serve as self-serving defensive justifications used to preserve a positive self-image when faced with moral transgressions, thereby being more likely to engage in rightful online behaviors. Therefore, our research aims to test the relationship between intellectual humility and the intention to verify online content, investigating the mediating role of moral disengagement. The study, conducted with 380 Italian adolescents ( M = 14.43, SD = 0.74), utilized a conversational web app to measure the variables of interest. The results show that moral disengagement fully mediates the relationship between intellectual humility and the intention to verify the information. This highlights the importance of fostering metacognitive abilities, such as self-reflection and the capacity to reconsider one’s own perspective, in promoting media literacy. These findings suggest that interventions aimed at enhancing intellectual humility may reduce moral disengagement toward fake news and promote more responsible online behavior. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.