Research

Culturally adaptive AI durably reduces health misinformation

A randomized field study of how the character delivering health information changes what women believe, and for how long.

Results

A month-long field study with 434 women

Women were randomly assigned to watch Ganga Devi (188), watch Amy (162), or receive no intervention (84). We tracked their belief in myths such as "childlessness is a curse" and "pregnancy must be hidden for the first trimester" over one month.

434

women in a randomized, longitudinal field study in India

30%

less misinformation belief after watching Ganga Devi, vs. control

17%

less misinformation belief after watching Amy, vs. control

3 wks

later, the gains held and Ganga Devi kept her lead

A culturally adaptive character reduced misinformation belief nearly twice as much. The largest advantage was on community-reinforced beliefs, such as blaming women for infertility.
Bar chart of change in correct belief compared to before the video. Culturally adaptive: +0.121 right after the video and +0.139 three weeks later (both p<.001). Culturally neutral: +0.064 after and +0.072 three weeks later (both p<.05). Bars show 95% confidence intervals.
Gain in correct belief compared to before the video, right after watching and three weeks later. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals.

Paper

Read the paper

Durably Reducing Belief in Women's Health Misinformation Through Culturally Adaptive AI Videos

Anku Rani, Kokil Jaidka, Shruti Sharma, Pragya Mahajan, Manisha Wadhwa, Andrew B. Lippman, Pattie Maes, Paul Pu Liang

arXiv:2609.19364 · 2026

Cite this work (BibTeX) 
@article{rani2026saheli,
  title   = {Durably Reducing Belief in Women's Health Misinformation
             Through Culturally Adaptive AI Videos},
  author  = {Rani, Anku and Jaidka, Kokil and Sharma, Shruti and
             Mahajan, Pragya and Wadhwa, Manisha and Lippman, Andrew B.
             and Maes, Pattie and Liang, Paul Pu},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.19364},
  year    = {2026}
}
arXiv PDF

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