Ariana Modirrousta-Galian

Who they are

Her 2023 paper with Philip Higham in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General is a reanalysis rather than a new experiment, and the contribution is methodological.

It describes the existing evaluations plainly: participants rated the reliability or manipulativeness of true and fake news items before and after playing Bad News or Go Viral, usually against a control group playing Tetris or doing nothing, and mean ratings were compared. Those designs cannot separate a genuine improvement in discrimination from a general increase in scepticism, because both lower the average rating of the fake items.

Reanalysed with receiver operating characteristic analysis, the games did not improve discrimination. The title says so.

She is also an author on the 2025 re-examination of the Bad News game using Indian headlines, which reported no evidence of improved discrimination on new material.

Key papers

Modirrousta-Galian, A., & Higham, P. A. (2023). "Gamified inoculation interventions do not improve discrimination between true and fake news: reanalyzing existing research with receiver operating characteristic analysis." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(9), 2411-2437. First author.

Seabrooke, T., Modirrousta-Galian, A., & Higham, P. A. (2025). "Re-examining the bad news game." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Second author.

Key ideas

Separate the two things the test measures. See Response Bias and Signal Detection Theory.

A reanalysis can be a finding. No new participants were needed to show that the existing evidence did not support the claim made from it.

The limitation this site records on her behalf: the reanalysis and the follow-up share authors, so this is one research group rather than independent confirmation.

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