Misinformation can lead to significant adverse consequences for society, such as the burning of 5G cell towers, increases in vaccine hesitancy, attempts at insurrection, and voting decisions made on the basis of lies.
To avoid effects like these, researchers have tried to find innovative ways to reduce the problematic influence of misinformation. One such method is “psychological inoculation,” where people are forewarned about how misinformation may be used to manipulate them and are given a weakened dose of the “virus” along with ways to identify and refute misinformation. This process strengthens their “cognitive immune system” and boosts their readiness to resist misinformation.
Although psychological inoculation has been studied for over 60 years, some important questions still remain largely unexplored: What is the long-term effectiveness of psychological inoculation, and what are the mechanisms behind it? In other words, what makes the psychological inoculation effect decay over time? In a study from the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Appliedopens in new window, Rakoen Maertens, Jon Roozenbeek, Melisa Basol, and Sander van der Linden explored these questions in the context of a large-scale gamified psychological inoculation intervention: a game called Bad Newsopens in new window.
Bad News is a short browser game that has been played by millions of people over the past couple years, and it serves as a scalable, classroom-ready approach to active psychological inoculation. In the game, participants walk a mile in the shoes of misinformation producers by building their own “fake news” empire in a simulated social media environment. Players must strike a balance between remaining sufficiently credible and building a follower base. While doing so, they create their own content and are inoculated against six manipulation techniques commonly used in misinformation: discrediting opponents (through ad hominem attacks), appealing to emotion, fuelling polarization, engaging in impersonation, spreading conspiracy theories, and trolling.
In this study, Maertens et al. investigated the long-term effectiveness of the game Bad News as a psychological inoculation intervention across three longitudinal experiments, spanning a period of 3 months. They found in the first experiment that the initial inoculation effect is strong (in the sense that playing the game significantly reduces the perceived reliability of social media content containing misinformation). In the same experiment, the researchers conducted regular follow-ups every couple weeks in which they tested people on their ability to detect misleading social media posts, and found that the inoculation effect can remain fully intact for 3 months when regularly tested. However, in a second experiment they found that when regular tests were excluded, the inoculation effect was no longer significant after a period of 2 months. In a third experiment, the researchers looked at item effects to exclude the possibility that the findings from the first two experiments were skewed by the use of specific items or by the ratio of fake to real news items, again finding support for the robustness of the psychological inoculation effect. Taken together, these studies indicate that there may be a true learning effect at play, which suggests it is worth exploring psychological inoculation through the lens of memory and forgetting.
The study has several important implications for both psychological inoculation research and policymakers. First, it opens the door for more research into the longevity of psychological inoculation interventions and the role of and interplay between memory and motivational processes that could lead to the decay. Second, it shows that intervention designers and implementers should consider introducing a regular psychological inoculation “booster shot” to restore the effects that decay over time, for example, by quizzing participants on their knowledge of the intervention or skills learned therein. In conclusion, gamified psychological inoculation interventions seem to work well in making people less susceptible to misleading information, and, with a regular booster, these effects can last for multiple months.
This article is in the Basic/Experimental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Basic/Experimental Psychology topic area.