Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence

By John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ullrich K. H. Ecker. PLoS ONE, 2017

737 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Misinformation can undermine a well-functioning democracy. For example, public misconceptions about climate change can lead to lowered acceptance of the reality of climate change and lowered support for mitigation policies. This study experimentally explored the impact of misinformation about climate change and tested several pre-emptive interventions designed to reduce the influence of misinformation. We found that false-balance media coverage (giving contrarian views equal voice with climate scientists) lowered perceived consensus overall, although the effect was greater among free-market supporters. Likewise, misinformation that confuses people about the level of scientific agreement regarding anthropogenic global warming (AGW) had a polarizing effect, with free-market supporters reducing their acceptance of AGW and those with low free-market support increasing their acceptance of AGW. However, we found that inoculating messages that (1) explain the flawed argumentation technique used in the misinformation or that (2) highlight the scientific consensus on climate change were effective in neutralizing those adverse effects of misinformation. We recommend that climate communication messages should take into account ways in which scientific content can be distorted, and include pre-emptive inoculation messages.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63d885990c0184ee6ceaf2ececb34f16fa40f69e

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Citations in the corpus

The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “, in the context of climate change [103]) may be more scalable.”
Inoculation theory in the post‐truth era: Extant findings and new frontiers for contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories (2021, methodology): “Similar to van der Linden, Leiserowitz, et al. (2017), Cook et al. (2017) found that false‐balance reduces perceptions of scientific agreement and that misinformation had a polarizing effect so that strong free‐market supporters lowered their belief in global warming whereas low free‐ market…”
Misinformation on Instagram: The Impact of Trusted Endorsements on Message Credibility (2020, background): “The spread of misinformation on social media has generated public concern due to its implications for society (Cook et al., 2017).”
Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. (2019, positive): “Alternatively, adding a pre-emptive inoculation statement (Cook et al., 2017), such as a warning that not all news stories are accurate, may further increase the strength of the correlation between analytic thinking and media truth discernment.”
The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings (2020, background): “…reasoning: explicit warnings have been found to reduce the effects of subsequently corrected misinfor-mation (Ecker et al. 2010, Lewandowsky et al. 2012, Chan et al. 2017) and to combat politicized interpretations of science (Bolsen and Druckman 2015, Cook et al. 2017, van der Linden et al. 2018).”
Testing the Effectiveness of Correction Placement and Type on Instagram (2020, background): “Previous studies on climate change have found logic-focused corrections describing fake experts (Cook et al. 2017; van der Linden et al. 2017) and cherry-picking (Schmid and Betsch 2019) successfully reduced misperceptions.”
Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation (2021, background): “To help scale the approach further, recent work has shifted away from inoculating against individual arguments towards conferring resistance against the techniques that underlie many instances of misinformation (Cook et al., 2017; Roozenbeek and van der Linden, 2018; van der Linden et al., 2021).”
You are fake news: political bias in perceptions of fake news (2020, background): “…Rand, 2019), cognitive style (Bronstein et al., 2019), the spread of fake news during elections (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Grinberg et al., 2019) and potential solutions, such as preemptively inoculating individuals against fake news (Cook et al., 2017; Roozenbeek and van der Linden, 2018, 2019).”
Creating News Literacy Messages to Enhance Expert Corrections of Misinformation on Twitter (2020, background): “Inoculation research has found that warning people about misleading tactics can neutralize the effects of misinformation messages (J. Cook et al., 2017; van der Linden et al., 2017).”
Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors (2018, methodology): “Climate misinformation also disproportionately influences conservatives (Cook et al 2017, van der Linden et al 2017), contributing to growing polarization over recent decades (McCright and Dunlap 2011).”
The different forms of COVID-19 misinformation and their consequences (2020, background): “This precise approach has proved efficacious in inoculating people against climate change misinformation (Cook et al., 2017).”
Do partisanship and politicization undermine the impact of a scientific consensus message about climate change? (2018, background): “In particular, in contrast to other recent work, our warning did not incorporate a detailed refutation of the politicization claim (Cook et al., 2017; van der Linden et al., 2017).”