Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media.

ABSTRACT: Online misinformation continues to have adverse consequences for society. Inoculation theory has been put forward as a way to reduce susceptibility to misinformation by informing people about how they might be misinformed, but its scalability has been elusive both at a theoretical level and a practical level. We developed five short videos that inoculate people against manipulation techniques commonly used in misinformation: emotionally manipulative language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and ad hominem attacks. In seven preregistered studies, i.e., six randomized controlled studies (n = 6464) and an ecologically valid field study on YouTube (n = 22,632), we find that these videos improve manipulation technique recognition, boost confidence in spotting these t

SUBMITTER: Roozenbeek J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9401631 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature