Countering misinformation through psychological inoculation

Feedback exercises boost discernment of misinformation for gamified inoculation interventions.

“…At this juncture, it is useful to conceptually distinguish inoculation from other forms of prebunking and competence-boosting interventions. Broadly speaking, the first and most obvious difference between prebunking and debunking concerns the timing of the intervention, such that any intervention prior to misinformation exposure can be considered a pre bunk (van der Linden, 2024), including simple forewarnings (Bertolotti & Catellani, 2023). However, the second difference relates to whether or not an actual competence or skill is being conferred, which is not the case with preemptive interventions such as some types of accuracy prompts (Pennycook et al, 2020) but is true of interventions that provide people with digital or media literacy tips (Guess et al, 2020; Lutzke et al, 2019; McGrew, 2020; Scheibenzuber et al, 2021).…”

“…What distinguishes inoculation from the aforementioned approaches besides the timing and level of detail is the specific format: Inoculations include (a) a forewarning that someone might be targeted with an attempt to manipulate their opinion (this is meant to elicit people’s motivation to defend themselves from an impending attack) and (b) rather than providing people solely with facts or tips, the intervention preemptively exposes people to weakened doses of a falsehood or the techniques used to produce falsehoods along with ways on how to identify and refute them (this is meant to provide people with the actual ability to resist the manipulation attempt). In other words, an intervention can only be considered true inoculation if it contains weakened doses (examples) of the misinformation or manipulation attempt (McGuire, 1964; van der Linden, 2024). As mentioned, one novel way of doing this is through simulations in a gamified environment.…”

“…The most prominent prebunking approach is to confer psychological resistance against misinformation through psychological inoculation (Compton, 2013;Compton et al, 2021;Traberg et al, 2022). Inoculation theory (McGuire, 1961b) posits that, much like injecting a weakened dose of a virus to help the immune system recognize potential attackers and organize an effective immune response, people build up "cognitive antibodies" when confronted with a "weakened dose" of misinformation that is preemptively refuted in a controlled setting (Compton, 2013;McGuire, 1961aMcGuire, , 1964McGuire & Papageorgis, 1962;van der Linden, 2024).…”