Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation
By Melisa Basol, J. Roozenbeek, M. Berriche, F. Uenal, William P. McClanahan, S. van der Linden. Big Data & Society, 2021
223 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Misinformation about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a pressing societal challenge. Across two studies, one preregistered (n1 = 1771 and n2 = 1777), we assess the efficacy of two ‘prebunking’ interventions aimed at improving people’s ability to spot manipulation techniques commonly used in COVID-19 misinformation across three different languages (English, French and German). We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, (a) increases the perceived manipulativeness of misinformation about COVID-19, (b) improves people’s attitudinal certainty (confidence) in their ability to spot misinformation and (c) reduces self-reported willingness to share misinformation with others. The first two effects remain significant for at least one week after gameplay. We also find that reading real-world infographics from UNESCO improves people’s ability and confidence in spotting COVID-19 misinformation (albeit with descriptively smaller effect sizes than the game). Limitations and implications for fake news interventions are discussed.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f210ef06ceef5da66b20ade05dd7b286731ba0ef
How researchers see this paper
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Communication
In Sociology and Political Science
- S. van der Linden
- Melisa Basol
- J. Compton
- John Cook
- J. Roozenbeek
- J. Reser
- Graham Bradley
- Thomas Nygren
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): “In short, the spread of inoculation adds an important social dimension to the theory (Basol et al., 2021).”