Psychological inoculation protects against the social media infodemic

Abstract

Misinformation can have a profound detrimental impact on populations’ wellbeing. In this large UK-based online experiment (n = 2430), we assessed the performance of false tag and inoculation interventions in protecting against different forms of misinformation (‘variants’). While previous experiments have used perception- or intention-based outcome measures, we presented participants with real-life misinformation posts in a social media platform simulation and measured their engagement, a more ecologically valid approach. Our pre-registered mixed-effects models indicated that both interventions reduced engagement with misinformation, but inoculation was most effective. However, random differences analysis revealed that the protection conferred by inoculation differed across posts. Moderation analysis indicated that immunity provided by inoculation is robust to variation in individuals’ cognitive reflection. This study provides novel evidence on the general effectiveness of inoculation interventions over false tags, social media platforms’ current approach. Given inoculation’s effect heterogeneity, a concert of interventions will likely be required for future safeguarding efforts.

What are they thinking? Exploring college students’ mental processing and decision making about COVID-19 (mis)information on social media.

“…Likewise, by nesting misinformation posts in a simulated "feed" alongside legitimate posts, our research design and questions were better concealed. Third, this approach is largely novel in the extant literature, and therefore provides unique information about social media behavior that complements the results of previous research (McPhedran et al, 2023).…”

“…However, much of the research on the effects of interventions and other design choices to affect people’s interactions with misinformation online have used intended behavior surveys or accuracy evaluations to measure effects, rather than capturing actual user behaviors in technology environments. Compared to self-reported outcomes like accuracy judgments, user behaviors, as captured via keyclick software installed on participants’ devices or via digital trace data in a simulated social media feed, are more ecologically valid indicators of both the effects of interventions (e.g., McPhedran et al, 2023) on processing after incidental exposure as well as the effects of such processing itself, as was the focus in this study.…”

Psychological inoculation strategies to fight climate disinformation across 12 countries

“…ref. 176 ). Even the strategy of reinforcing the inoculated protection with follow-up ‘booster shots’ 68 , 103 , 177 may be untenable, as our evidence suggests that they would already be needed after encountering a single climate disinformation statement.…”

Limits of functional illiteracy in explaining human misinformation: the knowledge illusion, values, and the dual process theory of thought

“…Specifically, functional illiteracy has been employed to explain the tendency to believe in fake news, conspiracy theories and the general spread of misinformation (Koppel and Langer, 2020 ; Moscadelli et al, 2020 ; Moro and Fioravanzi, 2022 ; McPhedran et al, 2023 ). Even EU funded projects mention this connection.…”