Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation

By J. Roozenbeek, S. van der Linden. Palgrave Communications, 2019

563 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The spread of online misinformation poses serious challenges to societies worldwide. In a novel attempt to address this issue, we designed a psychological intervention in the form of an online browser game. In the game, players take on the role of a fake news producer and learn to master six documented techniques commonly used in the production of misinformation: polarisation, invoking emotions, spreading conspiracy theories, trolling people online, deflecting blame, and impersonating fake accounts. The game draws on an inoculation metaphor, where preemptively exposing, warning, and familiarising people with the strategies used in the production of fake news helps confer cognitive immunity when exposed to real misinformation. We conducted a large-scale evaluation of the game with N = 15,000 participants in a pre-post gameplay design. We provide initial evidence that people’s ability to spot and resist misinformation improves after gameplay, irrespective of education, age, political ideology, and cognitive style.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec4d6001f387ce0a9565c7b5d68d52275caa0f2a

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Citations in the corpus

Prebunking interventions based on the psychological theory of “inoculation” can reduce susceptibility to misinformation across cultures. (2020, methodology): “Following Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2019) and Basol et al. (2020), we created a single fake news scale (averaged across all items) to reduce multiple testing (though item-level results are also presented by country in Tables 4, 5, and 6 in the appendix).”
Inoculation theory in the post‐truth era: Extant findings and new frontiers for contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories (2021, methodology): “For example, one novel approach to active inoculation is pioneered by Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2018, 2019)—who designed an interactive choice‐based fake news game (Bad News) during which participants actively generate their own antibodies by designing misleading content themselves in a…”
The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “For example, the 'Bad News Game' uses a 10–20 minute interactive tutorial to teach people how to identify fake news in an engaging way [101].”
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).”
Breaking Harmony Square: A game that “inoculates” against political misinformation (2020, methodology): “These are all important manipulation techniques used in political misinformation (Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019; van der Linden & Roozenbeek, 2020).”
Combatting climate change misinformation: Evidence for longevity of inoculation and consensus messaging effects (2020, unknown): “Although research on the benefits of communicating scientific consensus is now well-established (see van der Linden et al., 2019, for a recent review), research has also shown that when it is countered with an opposing (misinformation) message that contradicts the scientific consensus (e.g., a…”
The Debunking Handbook 2020 (2020, unknown): “Recently, it has been shown that inoculation can be scaled up through engaging multimedia applications, such as cartoons 35 and games 36, 37 .”
Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, unknown): “…economics (Clarke et al. 2020; Kogan et al. 2019; Goldstein and Yang 2019), psychology (Roozenbeek et al. 2020a; Van der Linden and Roozenbeek 2020; Roozenbeek and van der Linden 2019), political science (Valenzuela et al. 2022; Bringula et al. 2022; Ricard and Medeiros 2020; Van der Linden et al.…”