Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking

ABSTRACT

There has been increasing concern with the growing infusion of misinformation, or “fake news”, into public discourse and politics in many western democracies. Our article first briefly reviews the current state of the literature on conventional countermeasures to misinformation. We then explore proactive measures to prevent misinformation from finding traction in the first place that is based on the psychological theory of “inoculation”. Inoculation rests on the idea that if people are forewarned that they might be misinformed and are exposed to weakened examples of the ways in which they might be misled, they will become more immune to misinformation. We review a number of techniques that can boost people’s resilience to misinformation, ranging from general warnings to more specific instructions about misleading (rhetorical) techniques. We show that based on the available evidence, inoculation appears to be a promising avenue to help protect people from misinformation and “fake news”.

KEYWORDS:

• Fake News
• Misinformation
• Inoculation Theory
• Prebunking

Notes

¹ The “backfire” effect reported by Nyhan and Reifler (2010) has been found to be less common than initially thought (Guess & Coppock, 2018; Wood & Porter, 2018). We are therefore reluctant to expect backfire effects generally; however, the exact replication of Nyhan and Reifler (2010) reported by Wood and Porter (2018) (their Figure 5) are visually identical to those reported by Nyhan and Reifler (2010). When corrections challenge worldviews, we should therefore still be sensitive to the possibility of a backfire effect even though we should not routinely expect it.

² For a detailed methodological overview of item and testing effects using the Bad News paradigm we refer the reader to Roozenbeek et al. (2020b).

³ The study by Matz et al. (2017) has been subjected to critiques (Eckles et al., 2018; Sharp et al., 2018) which were (in our view) convincingly rebutted by the authors (Matz et al., 2018a, 2018b).