Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media
University of Cambridge · Google (United States) · +2 more institutions
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…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 146.21
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 56
Authors
5Topics & keywords
- Misinformation
- Social media
- Internet privacy
- Resilience (materials science)
- Psychological resilience
- Psychology
- Computer science
- Social psychology