People are increasingly exposed to conflicting health and nutrition information. Conflicting information can result in several adverse outcomes, such as confusion, media scepticism, loss of confidence in scientific research’s credibility and people being less likely to engage in health behaviours, including those that are not necessarily surrounded by conflicting information. Having more or less adaptive epistemic beliefs could explain one’s ability to integrate and comprehend conflicting information. However, few studies have investigated the impact of short-term text-based interventions to raise meta-cognitive awareness of these beliefs on consumers. This study aims to explore the effect of such an educational intervention on participants’ capacity to deal with conflicting health information. The intervention includes an MDP task, which encourages reflection on the epistemic implications of thought-provoking and conflicting written information.

A randomised controlled trial is conducted with pre, post and follow-up measurements. This online study is designed in Qualtrics. Participants (n>100) are randomly assigned to one of three groups; guided, exposed or control. The participants are provided with a set of documents with different viewpoints on a nutrition topic. They are asked to read the information and write a health-behaviour recommendation, including a justification for that recommendation. A questionnaire collects socio-demographic information, and assesses co-variables such as topic familiarity and involvement. A questionnaire also measures epistemic beliefs and beliefs about scientific disputes through validated scales, and measures self-efficacy to deal with multiple information sources, and intention to engage in health behaviours.

We describe people’s performance on the health information integration task and investigate differences between the three groups. We explore associations between participants’ task performance and self-reported epistemic beliefs. We compare self-reported self-efficacy in handling information and intention to engage in health behaviours between groups at follow-up measurement. We investigate differences between pre, post and follow-up quantitative measures of epistemic beliefs, and explore differences between groups. Associations with a set of covariates, including socio-demographic characteristics and topic involvement are analysed.

Implications for the potential role of a multiple source processing task as a novel intervention method to improve one’s ability to handle conflicting health information are discussed.