Misinformation about COVID-19 is a major threat to public health. Using five national samples from the UK ( n = 1050 and n = 1150), Ireland ( n = 700), the USA ( n = 700), Spain ( n = 700) and Mexico ( n = 700), we examine predictors of belief in the most common statements about the virus that contain misinformation. We also investigate the prevalence of belief in COVID-19 misinformation across different countries and the role of belief in such misinformation in predicting relevant health behaviours. We find that while public belief in misinformation about COVID-19 is not particularly common, a substantial proportion views this type of misinformation as highly reliable in each country surveyed. In addition, a small group of participants find common factual information about the virus highly unreliable. We also find that increased susceptibility to misinformation negatively affects people's self-reported compliance with public health guidance about COVID-19, as well as people's willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and to recommend the vaccine to vulnerable friends and family. Across all countries surveyed, we find that higher trust in scientists and having higher numeracy skills were associated with lower susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation. Taken together, these results demonstrate a clear link between susceptibility to misinformation and both vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood to comply with health guidance measures, and suggest that interventions which aim to improve critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research.

The spread of online misinformation poses serious challenges to societies worldwide. In a novel attempt to address this issue, we designed a psychological intervention in the form of an online browser game. In the game, players take on the role of a fake news producer and learn to master six documented techniques commonly used in the production of misinformation: polarisation, invoking emotions, spreading conspiracy theories, trolling people online, deflecting blame, and impersonating fake accounts. The game draws on an inoculation metaphor, where preemptively exposing, warning, and familiarising people with the strategies used in the production of fake news helps confer cognitive immunity when exposed to real misinformation. We conducted a large-scale evaluation of the game with N = 15,000 participants in a pre-post gameplay design. We provide initial evidence that people's ability to spot and resist misinformation improves after gameplay, irrespective of education, age, political ideology, and cognitive style.

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. In this article, we explore the coronavirus "infodemic" and how behavioral scientists may seek to address this problem. We detail the scope of the problem and discuss the negative influence that COVID-19 misinformation can have on the widespread adoption of health protective behaviors in the population. In response, we explore how insights from the behavioral sciences can be leveraged to manage an effective societal response to curb the spread of misinformation about the virus. In particular, we discuss the theory of psychological inoculation (or prebunking) as an efficient vehicle for conferring large-scale psychological resistance against fake news.

Recent research has explored the possibility of building attitudinal resistance against online misinformation through psychological inoculation. The inoculation metaphor relies on a medical analogy: by pre-emptively exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation cognitive immunity can be conferred. A recent example is the Bad News game, an online fake news game in which players learn about six common misinformation techniques. We present a replication and extension into the effectiveness of Bad News as an anti-misinformation intervention. We address three shortcomings identified in the original study: the lack of a control group, the relatively low number of test items, and the absence of attitudinal certainty measurements. Using a 2 (treatment vs. control) × 2 (pre vs. post) mixed design (N = 196) we measure participants' ability to spot misinformation techniques in 18 fake headlines before and after playing Bad News. We find that playing Bad News significantly improves people's ability to spot misinformation techniques compared to a gamified control group, and crucially, also increases people's level of confidence in their own judgments. Importantly, this confidence boost only occurred for those who updated their reliability assessments in the correct direction. This study offers further evidence for the effectiveness of psychological inoculation against not only specific instances of fake news, but the very strategies used in its production. Implications are discussed for inoculation theory and cognitive science research on fake news.

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