Technique-based inoculation against real-world misinformation

Abstract

In recent years, numerous psychological interventions have been developed to reduce susceptibility to misinformation. Inoculation theory has become an increasingly common framework for reducing susceptibility to both individual examples of misinformation (issue-based inoculation) and to the techniques and strategies that are commonly used to mislead or misinform people (technique-based inoculation). In this study, we address two open questions related to technique-based inoculation in two separate experiments (total n = 2188; convenience sample recruited via the Bad News online game platform): (i) can technique-based inoculation effectively reduce susceptibility to real-world misinformation that went viral on social media? and (ii) can technique-based inoculation confer cross-protection against misinformation that does not make use of any of the techniques against which people were inoculated? We find that playing a 15 min game confers psychological resistance against real-world misinformation that makes use of manipulation techniques against which people were inoculated (Cohen's d = 0.37, Cohen's U 3 = 64.4%, p < 0.001), and that cross-protection is achieved but at a reduced effect size ( d = 0.10, U 3 = 54.0%, p = 0.001).

Psychological interventions countering misinformation in social media: A scoping review

“…Diversification of research perspectives may be essential when designing psychological interventions for these users. Moreover, scoping reviews and, even more importantly, systematic reviews with meta-analysis measuring the effectiveness of interventions should be conducted to catch up with continuously published new studies ( 27 , 52 – 55 ) and to supplement the results of traditional reviews ( 56 ) which have been recently published on this issue. ( 57 , 58 ).…”

“…In terms of selection bias, two factors should be considered: restraining searches to a limited number of databases and the rapidly growing number of studies on mitigating social media misinformation published after conducting searches ( 27 , 52 – 55 ). In order to mitigate the risk of selection bias, the authors conducted a supplementary search consisting of an additional Google Scholar search and a bibliographic search.…”

Pathways To Online Political Hostility On Social Media

“…For instance, state-of-the-art interventions against online political hostility address non-political factors such as improving competences (Guess et al, 2020;Rasmussen, Lindekilde and Petersen, 2022;Roozenbeek, Traberg and Van Der Linden, 2022;Van Der Linden, 2022), nudging people to think about accuracy (Pennycook et al, 2021) or emphasizing empathy (Munger, 2016;Siegel and Badaan, 2020;Hangartner et al, 2021). In other words, these interventions do not address the political roots of hostility in political discussions online.…”

Psychological inoculation protects against the social media infodemic

“…Inoculation interventions have been shown to reduce susceptibility across policy domains, with targeted approaches used to address health (Compton et al, 2016), political (Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2018) and environmental (van der Linden et al, 2017) misinformation. Even more promisingly, in recent years, gamified inoculation interventions have been shown to provide generalised protection against misinformation, including those that use manipulation techniques that differ to those directly addressed in the intervention (Roozenbeek, Traberg, et al, 2022). Such protection appears to have an effect that exceeds a month in duration (Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2018) and remains efficacious when information is presented in a non-gamified video format .…”