Good News about Bad News: Gamified Inoculation Boosts Confidence and Cognitive Immunity Against Fake News
By Melisa Basol, J. Roozenbeek, S. van der Linden. Journal of Cognition, 2020
304 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent research has explored the possibility of building attitudinal resistance against online misinformation through psychological inoculation. The inoculation metaphor relies on a medical analogy: by pre-emptively exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation cognitive immunity can be conferred. A recent example is the Bad News game, an online fake news game in which players learn about six common misinformation techniques. We present a replication and extension into the effectiveness of Bad News as an anti-misinformation intervention. We address three shortcomings identified in the original study: the lack of a control group, the relatively low number of test items, and the absence of attitudinal certainty measurements. Using a 2 (treatment vs. control) × 2 (pre vs. post) mixed design (N = 196) we measure participants’ ability to spot misinformation techniques in 18 fake headlines before and after playing Bad News. We find that playing Bad News significantly improves people’s ability to spot misinformation techniques compared to a gamified control group, and crucially, also increases people’s level of confidence in their own judgments. Importantly, this confidence boost only occurred for those who updated their reliability assessments in the correct direction. This study offers further evidence for the effectiveness of psychological inoculation against not only specific instances of fake news, but the very strategies used in its production. Implications are discussed for inoculation theory and cognitive science research on fake news.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/636b62b29587c82d86eb6be94046f6352c089227
How researchers see this paper
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Literature and Literary Theory
In Sociology and Political Science
- S. van der Linden
- J. Roozenbeek
- Melisa Basol
- Stephan Lewandowsky
- Thomas Nygren
- John Cook
- J. Compton
- F. Uenal
Citations in the corpus
- Inoculation theory in the post‐truth era: Extant findings and new frontiers for contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories (2021, background): “…within‐subject design (N = 15,000) finds that the active experience significantly inoculates (d = 0.16 to d = 0.52) players against misinformation (Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2018, 2019) and that the game also boosts confidence, a critical factor in resisting persuasion (Basol et al., 2020).”
- Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking (2021, background): “Importantly, Basol et al. (2020) also included a measure of how much confidence players had in their judgments.”
- Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation (2021, methodology): “Yet, little is currently known about the differences between active and passive inoculation treatments (Banas and Rains; Compton et al., 2021), their persistence over time (Maertens et al., 2020) and their effect on attitudinal certainty (Basol et al., 2020).”
- Combatting climate change misinformation: Evidence for longevity of inoculation and consensus messaging effects (2020, unknown): “Examples include the popular fake news game, Bad News (Basol et al., 2020; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019) and the smartphone application Climate Change vs. Cranky Uncle (Goering, 2019).”
- Breaking Harmony Square: A game that “inoculates” against political misinformation (2020, methodology): “…(which has been the standard in inoculation research), Harmony Square builds cognitive resistance against the techniques that underpin a whole range of political misinformation in an attempt to achieve broad-spectrum resistance against manipulation (Basol et al., 2020; Cook et al., 2017).”
- Prebunking interventions based on the psychological theory of “inoculation” can reduce susceptibility to misinformation across cultures. (2020, methodology): “However, randomized trials with the English version of the game have been conducted (Basol et al., 2020), highlighting similar results across diverse groups (Basol et al., 2020), consistent with the current findings.”