Inoculation theory in the post‐truth era: Extant findings and new frontiers for contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories

By J. Compton, S. van der Linden, John Cook, Melisa Basol. Social & Personality Psychology Compass, 2021

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although there has been unprecedented attention to inoculation theory in recent years, the potential of this research has yet to be reached Inoculation theory explains how immunity to counter‐attitudinal messages is conferred by preemptively exposing people to weakened doses of challenging information The theory has been applied in a number of contexts (e g , politics, health) in its 50+ year history Importantly, one of the newest contexts for inoculation theory is work in the area of contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories Recent research has revealed that when a desirable position on a scientific issue (e g , climate change) exists, conventional preemptive (prophylactic) inoculation can help to protect it from misinformation, and that even when people have undesirable positions, “therapeutic” inoculation messages can have positive effects We call for further research to explain and predict the efficacy of inoculation theory in this new context to help inform better public understandings of issues such as climate change, genetically modified organisms, vaccine hesitancy, and other contested science beliefs such as conspiracy theories about COVID‐19 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Social & Personality Psychology Compass is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

Subfields: Health, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e5507efaf5c66d61c6b74519b30ad43fcebb057

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Citations in the corpus

Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation (2021, background): “In practice, this distinction matters little as people are inoculated regardless of prior exposure, but theoretically it helps to elucidate the conditions under which inoculation can be effective (Compton, 2019; Compton et al., 2021; van der Linden and Roozenbeek, 2020).”