Media release

From: The Royal Society

Could being exposed to small amounts of misinformation protect you against it in the future? Researchers found that playing the game Bad News for 15 minutes, where participants were exposed to fake and real headlines, increased psychological resistance against real-world misinformation that went viral on social media. The game may be implemented as part of media literacy curricula in schools and deployed in conjunction with other anti-misinformation tools to improve resilience against online misinformation at scale.

Technique-Based Inoculation Against Real-World Misinformation

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 (technique-based inoculation). In two experiments using the anti-misinformation game Bad News, we find that technique-based inoculation effectively reduces susceptibility to real-world misinformation that went viral on social media, and that technique-based inoculation can confer cross-protection against misinformation that does not make use of any of the techniques against which people were inoculated.