The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. In this article, we explore the coronavirus "infodemic" and how behavioral scientists may seek to address this problem. We detail the scope of the problem and discuss the negative influence that COVID-19 misinformation can have on the widespread adoption of health protective behaviors in the population. In response, we explore how insights from the behavioral sciences can be leveraged to manage an effective societal response to curb the spread of misinformation about the virus. In particular, we discuss the theory of psychological inoculation (or prebunking) as an efficient vehicle for conferring large-scale psychological resistance against fake news.

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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.

Student credit card debt is a growing problem. This study explores the effectiveness of the inoculation strategy to foster resistance to credit card marketing targeting college students. In order to explore further the medical analogy on which the inoculation strategy is based, this study was the first systematically to alter the argument strength of both the counterarguments and refutations in the inoculation pretreatment message to determine whether argument strengths impact effectiveness of inoculation treatments. In addition, this investigation explored whether inoculation spreads from person to person via social channels, similar to the marketing concept of viral marketing. Results indicated that conventional inoculation treatment messages successfully inoculated college students against credit card advertisements, manifested in attitude valence and behavioral intentions, and that matching argument strength is the most effective inoculation strategy.