Philip Higham
Psychologist at the University of Southampton working on memory, metacognition and how judgement accuracy is measured. That background is why the strongest methodological critique of the misinformation games came from outside the misinformation literature.
Who they are
Higham's field is the measurement of judgement: how to tell whether somebody has actually become more accurate rather than merely more cautious.
Applied to the inoculation games, that produced the 2023 reanalysis with Ariana Modirrousta-Galian and the 2025 re-examination with Tina Seabrooke. The first showed the published evaluations could not separate discrimination from response bias, and that separating them removed the claimed effect. The second looked for the effect in new material, Indian true and fake headlines, and did not find it.
The pattern is one this site keeps encountering: a confident literature is checked by somebody whose expertise is in the instrument rather than in the subject.
Key papers
Modirrousta-Galian, A., & Higham, P. A. (2023). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(9), 2411-2437. Senior author.
Seabrooke, T., Modirrousta-Galian, A., & Higham, P. A. (2025). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Senior author.
Key ideas
Measurement expertise is a form of subject expertise. See Signal Detection Theory.
Scepticism is not accuracy. See Response Bias.
What remains unmeasured, by either side: whether a population that trusts less but sorts no better is better off.
Sources
- Modirrousta-Galian & Higham (2023), doi:10.1037/xge0001395. Seabrooke, Modirrousta-Galian & Higham (2025), doi:10.3758/s13423-025-02827-x. Both verified at the published record 5 October 2026.