2026 Theses Doctoral

Navigating Contested Claims: Discernment, Skepticism, and the Social Organization of Evaluation

Yadav, Monika

This dissertation examines how misinformation interventions reshape evaluation and how contested public claims are navigated in everyday life. While research on misinformation has considerably expanded over the past two decades, three limitations remain.

First, when interventions reduce belief in falsehoods, it is often unclear whether they do so by improving people’s ability to distinguish true from false information or by making them more skeptical overall. Second, intervention research often treats factual accuracy as the primary outcome, even though misinformation matters politically and socially because it can shape attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior. Third, much of the literature studies evaluation in controlled environments rather than in the ordinary social contexts where contested claims are actually encountered, discussed, repeated, and rendered consequential. The dissertation addresses these limitations through three linked studies in India using mixed methods.

Chapter 1 develops a micro-founded structural framework that distinguishes truth discernment from skepticism and applies it to a large ten-week field experiment. Treated participants received weekly app-based digests of curated fact-checks of viral misinformation. The intervention reduced belief in false claims, but structural estimation shows that this reflected two distinct changes. Truth discernment increased, but skepticism also rose, and these mechanisms unfolded on different temporal schedules, with skepticism appearing earlier and discernment emerging more gradually. The chapter also shows downstream treatment effects on minority-related factual beliefs, policy attitudes, and prosocial behavior.

Chapter 2 applies the structural framework comparatively across misinformation intervention studies, showing that this dual-mechanism pattern is not specific to a single design but recurs across approaches and contexts.

Chapter 3 turns from interventions to the everyday evaluation of contested claims. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, it argues that evaluation is organized by interactional settings. By tracing variation in situational format, group composition, and conversational mode, the chapter shows how settings shape the terms of evaluation and produce graded plausibility rather than stable verdicts of truth or falsity.