The Science Behind BestWorld

News that Readers Can Trust and Use

BestWorld is reimagining both traditional and internet-based news. Our goal: a scalable demonstration of a news ecosystem that is truthful, believable, impactful, beneficial, supports communities, and would be scalable worldwide.

Research Findings Supporting BestWorld’s Goals

Forecasting competitions cause people to become less polarized on unrelated topics

"We explore the power of ... forecasting tournaments, to encourage clashing factions to do something odd: to translate their beliefs into nuanced probability judgments and track accuracy over time and questions."

“In a two-year forecasting tournament, participants who actively engaged in predicting US domestic events were less polarized in their policy preferences than were non-forecasters.”

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How to detect both disinformation and GenAI bots

Our BestWorld team, using techniques discovered by "Two ways to be complex and why they matter: Implications for attitude strength and lying" have found that these also can reliably detect GenAI bots.

"Lying decreases dialectical complexity but increases elaborative complexity, implicating a strategic...view of the lying-complexity relationship.... Dialectical complexity involves implicitly recognizing the tension between different dimensions a...

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Four Traits of Superforecasters [tm] of Geopolitical Events

"Recently, the U.S. Intelligence Community sponsored a series of forecasting tournaments…. In this article, we describe the winning strategy..."

"We find support for four mutually reinforcing explanations of superforecaster performance: (a) cognitive abilities and styles, (b) task-specific skills, (c) motivation and commitment, and (d) enriched environments."

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What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns?

The best forecasters don’t rush to reduce cognitive dissonance (Festingher, 1957) and don’t jump to conclusions from vivid case-specific events (Kahneman, 2011).

Top forecasters show higher dialectical complexity in their rationales and use more comparison classes

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“Open-minded thinkers are more likely than others to make accurate forecasts.”

"We focus on actively open-minded thinking (AOT), need for cognition, grit, and the tendency to maximize... when making decisions."

“AOT predicted the tendency to collect information, and information acquisition predicted performanc.... actively open-minded thinkers are more likely than others to make accurate forecasts.”

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Open-minded Thinking and Gaining Knowledge

Errors in estimating and forecasting often result from the failure to collect and consider enough relevant information.

“In three studies, participants made estimates and predictions of uncertain quantities... AOT predicted the tendency to collect information, and information acquisition predicted performance.”

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Opening Closed Minds with Tournaments

“Tournaments have the potential to open closed minds and increase assertion-to-evidence ratios in polarized scientific and policy debates.”

"Forecasting tournaments are level-playing-field competitions that reveal which individuals, teams, or algorithms generate more accurate probability estimates on which topics.

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Shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of people’s news-sharing decisions.

"Prior work shows that shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of people’s news-sharing decisions....Overall, we observed significant partisan moderation ... "

"[After evaluating] “a single neutral (nonpolitical, non-COVID-19) headline… [these] accuracy prompts had a significant positive effect on sharing discernment...

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Adversarial Collaborations: a way to settle differences over facts

Adversarial collaborations call on scholars to make good faith efforts to articulate each other’s positions so that each side feels fairly characterized, not caricatured.

"Each collaborator serves as a check on their adversary to confirm that the hypotheses are falsifiable, the scientific tests are fair, and the interpretations accurately characterize the findings.

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Combatting the problem of erroneous research results through adversarial collaborations

"Some highly publicized findings have failed to replicate, and many highly touted 'science-based' interventions have failed to produce promised positive social change."

"Adversarial collaborations, a methodological procedure in which disagreeing scholars work together to resolve their empirical disputes, are the next necessary science reform for addressing lingering weaknesses in social scientific norms."

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Intense dialogues with an AI chatbot reduces beliefs in false conspiracy stories

"ChatGPT to the rescue?" " New research indicates that finding the right facts can instill skepticism in conspiracy believers, and artificial intelligence (AI) is just the tool to help."

"A new study, reported in this issue of Science, suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) could provide a means to dispel misinformation and in a way that lasts."

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Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI

"We find robust evidence that the debunking conversation with the AI reduced belief in conspiracy theories by roughly 20%."

".. This effect did not decay over 2 months time, was consistently observed across a wide range of different conspiracy theories, and occurred even for participants whose conspiracy beliefs were deeply entrenched...."

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