Breaking Harmony Square: A game that “inoculates” against political misinformation

Abstract

We present Harmony Square, a short, free-to-play online game in which players learn how political misinformation is produced and spread. We find that the game confers psychological resistance against manipulation techniques commonly used in political misinformation: players from around the world find social media content making use of these techniques significantly less reliable after playing, are more confident in their ability to spot such content, and less likely to report sharing it with others in their network.

Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation

“…In addition, several other important gaps in our understanding of inoculation theory remain: relatively little attention is paid to how psychological inoculations affect how likely people are to share misinformation (but see Roozenbeek and van der Linden, 2020). Reducing the spread of misinformation and sharing the ‘vaccine’ are important elements in achieving psychological ‘herd immunity’ (Compton and Pfau, 2009; van der Linden et al., 2017a), particularly within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…The first intervention is Go Viral! , a novel and freely available five-minute choice-based browser game similar in design to other ‘fake news’ games such as Bad News (Roozenbeek and van der Linden, 2019) and Harmony Square (Roozenbeek and van der Linden, 2020). We created Go Viral!…”

Research note: Likes, sarcasm and politics: Youth responses to a platform-initiated media literacy campaign on social media

“…Amidst an alarming rise in online misinformation (McGinty & Gyenes, 2020;Pasquetto et al, 2020), there has been a growing interest in media literacy education as a way to combat the rapid spread of misinformation (Bulger & Davison, 2018;Chang et al, 2020;Roozenbeek & Van Der Linden, 2020;Tully, et al, 2020). However, the focus of both research and practice has been on the integration of media literacy instruction into young people's various educational experiences, rather than implementing and evaluating such initiatives in situ, on social media (Bulger & Davison, 2018;Pasquetto et al, 2020)-which is known to be their central news source (Common Sense Media, 2019).…”

Some recommendations for doing high‐impact research in social psychological science

“…For example, together with the UK government and with support from the WHO and the UN we launched “Go Viral!”, a free 5‐minute game that explains how to spot misinformation about COVID‐19 (Figure 1). Some of our games have been played by over a million people around the world (Maertens et al, 2020; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2020). One opportunity leads to another.…”

“…They can help fund impact‐oriented research and it’s also a great way to learn more about the types of real‐world problems they are facing and how your research may be able to help address them. In my own area of research, governments and social media companies can help implement, evaluate, and significantly magnify the impact of our interventions (e.g., see Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2020).…”