Adolescents' vulnerability to disinformation: Its measurement and relationship to critical thinking and moral disengagement

Young adolescents are more vulnerable to disinformation owing to the time that they spend online and their content consumption habits. The consequences of this phenomenon can be serious, both for the individual and at a social and political level. To alleviate this situation, different agencies recommend healthy practices regarding consumption and exchange of information; from checklists to self-learning exercises for the development of critical thinking. This research proposes a tool for the identification of behaviours among adolescents when giving credibility to information or content and the motives that lead them to share it, contributing at times to the spread of misleading information. After an exhaustive process of design, piloting, and psychometric validation using an English-speaking sample (N = 417), a reliable instrument was obtained. We also measured its correlation with critical thinking and moral disengagement. The results lead us to conclude that this is a new tool with which to observe the information consumption behaviours of young people and thus measure their vulnerability to disinformation. Similarly, we have confirmed how greater critical thinking is positively related to more responsible consumption when giving credibility to content or news, and how moral disengagement is linked to the fact of sharing such items with greater ease.