Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Jan 10;3(1):2.
doi: 10.5334/joc.91.

Good News about Bad News: Gamified Inoculation Boosts Confidence and Cognitive Immunity Against Fake News

Melisa Basol  1 , Jon Roozenbeek  1 , Sander van der Linden  1
Affiliations

Good News about Bad News: Gamified Inoculation Boosts Confidence and Cognitive Immunity Against Fake News

Melisa Basol et al. J Cogn. .

Abstract

Recent research has explored the possibility of building attitudinal resistance against online misinformation through psychological inoculation. The inoculation metaphor relies on a medical analogy: by pre-emptively exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation cognitive immunity can be conferred. A recent example is the Bad News game, an online fake news game in which players learn about six common misinformation techniques. We present a replication and extension into the effectiveness of Bad News as an anti-misinformation intervention. We address three shortcomings identified in the original study: the lack of a control group, the relatively low number of test items, and the absence of attitudinal certainty measurements. Using a 2 (treatment vs. control) × 2 (pre vs. post) mixed design (N = 196) we measure participants' ability to spot misinformation techniques in 18 fake headlines before and after playing Bad News. We find that playing Bad News significantly improves people's ability to spot misinformation techniques compared to a gamified control group, and crucially, also increases people's level of confidence in their own judgments. Importantly, this confidence boost only occurred for those who updated their reliability assessments in the correct direction. This study offers further evidence for the effectiveness of psychological inoculation against not only specific instances of fake news, but the very strategies used in its production. Implications are discussed for inoculation theory and cognitive science research on fake news.

Keywords: Decision making: Reasoning; Judgment.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Landing screen Bad News (Panel A) and simulated twitter engine (Panel B).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Median difference (post-pre) in reliability assessments of fake news items across treatment conditions with jitter (Panel A) and density plots of the data distributions (Panel B).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Median change scores (post-pre) of confidence in reliability judgments across treatment conditions with jitter (Panel A) and density plots of the data distributions (Panel B).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Arun, C. (2019). On WhatsApp, Rumours, and Lynchings. Economic & Political Review Weekly, 6, 30–35.
    1. Banas, J. A., & Rains, S. A. (2010). A Meta-Analysis of Research on Inoculation Theory. Communication Monographs, 77(3), 281–311. DOI: 10.1080/03637751003758193 - DOI
    1. Bonetto, E., Troïan, J., Varet, F., Monaco, G. L., & Girandola, F. (2018). Priming Resistance to Persuasion decreases adherence to Conspiracy Theories. Social Influence, 13(3), 125–136. DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2018.1471415 - DOI
    1. Chan, M., Pui, S., Jones, C. R., Hall Jamieson, K., & Albarracín, D. (2017). Debunking: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychological Efficacy of Messages Countering Misinformation. Psychological Science, 28(11), 1531–1546. DOI: 10.1177/0956797617714579 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Compton, J. (2013). Inoculation theory. In Dillard J. P., & Shen L. (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Persuasion: Developments in Theory and Practice (pp. 220–237). DOI: 10.4135/9781452218410.n14 - DOI

Grants and funding

The authors thank the University of Cambridge and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for funding this research.