Coignitive Resilience in Propaganda

 

Online misinformation continues to have adverse consequences for society. Inoculation theory has been put forward as a way to reduce susceptibility to misinformation by informing people about how they might be misinformed, but its scalability has been elusive both at a theoretical level and a practical level. We developed five short videos that inoculate people against manipulation techniques commonly used in misinformation: emotionally manipulative language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and ad hominem attacks. In seven preregistered studies, i.e., six randomized controlled studies (n = 6464) and an ecologically valid field study on YouTube (n = 22,632), we find that these videos improve manipulation technique recognition, boost confidence in spotting these techniques, increase people’s ability to discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content, and improve the quality of their sharing decisions. These effects are robust across the political spectrum and a wide variety of covariates. We show that psychological inoculation campaigns on social media are effective at improving misinformation resilience at scale.

For this study, we designed five short, animated inoculation videos in partnership with Google Jigsaw, each exposing a manipulation technique commonly encountered on social media and in other online environments. These videos were designed to “inoculate” people against being misled by flawed argumentation used in common online misinformation, such as excessively emotional language with an aim to invoke anger or outrage (22). In seven preregistered studies (and one pilot study), we tested the efficacy of each of these videos using a randomized controlled design. The pilot study (n = 194; see table S2 for the main results) was conducted with the emotional language video to validate our stimuli sets and outcome measures. The only difference of note between the pilot and the final studies is that in the pilot, we used “credibility” instead of “trustworthiness” as the third outcome measure (the reason for changing it from credibility to trustworthiness is because this term is associated with source or messenger credibility, and since we removed all source information from our stimuli, pilot study participants may have found the use of this outcome measure somewhat confusing). Additional information including the full datasets, analysis and visualization scripts, Qualtrics surveys, and our stimuli can be found on our OSF page: https://osf.io/3769y/. The videos can be viewed on https://inoculation.science.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo6254