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Misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and the response are virulent and harmful, with life-threatening consequences for individuals and communities around the world. Amplified online and via social media, false narratives about the pandemic build on and reinforce existing prejudice and ignorance, undermining trust in science and fuelling hate speech.

In the recent Cambridge University study ‘Towards psychological herd immunity: cross cultural evidence for two pre-bunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation’, Melisa Basol and Dr. Jon Roozenbeek of the University’s Social Decision-Making Lab examine two ‘pre-bunking’ interventions – the Cambridge’s GoViral! game and UNESCO’s #ThinkBeforeSharing infographics – concluding that both increased people’s perception of the manipulation related to misinformation, increased their confidence in spotting misinformation, and reduced their reported willingness to share it.

These pre-bunking approaches provide key insights on developing critical thinking competencies that complement and reinforce UNESCO’s Education and Media and Information Literacy initiatives strengthening resilience against mis- and disinformation and hate speech. In line with these efforts, UNESCO is also preparing an advocacy document for educators based on the #ThinkBeforeSharing campaign to assist with addressing conspiracy theories in education contexts.

Across the world, the pandemic has shown that people are extremely susceptible both to simple falsehoods about COVID-19 and elaborate conspiracy theories. In your research, you are looking at ‘misinformation’ from a psychological perspective: what is misinformation, why is it attractive to so many people, and what makes it so dangerous?

We define misinformation as information that is false or misleading (e.g. by leaving out important context), intentionally or unintentionally. Misinformation about the virus can spread in a similarly contagious way to the virus itself. During the pandemic, there have been many instances of misinformation causing real harm, ranging from drinking methanol and burning down 5G towers to refusing masks and vaccinations, which has led to numerous deaths.

Misinformation seems to be particularly attractive during times of high uncertainty; at the beginning of the pandemic, nobody really knew exactly how deadly COVID-19 was, whether healthcare systems would collapse, etc., which opened the way for people to fill in the gaps, for example by peddling fake cures or spreading conspiracy theories.

What makes misinformation so dangerous is the pace and depth at which it travels. Research shows that false or unverified information can travel faster and further than any other information and that even after misinformation is debunked, people can continue to believe and rely on it.

The study focuses on ‘pre-bunking’ or ‘inoculation theory’ to prevent the spread of misinformation, including conspiracy theories. How does ‘pre-bunking’ work, why is it effective and what can people do to build their resilience to misinformation?

The current scholarship on combating fake news offers two main approaches. One is more reactive and includes efforts of debunking and fact-checking. However, a growing body of research underlines the cognitive hurdles when it comes to undoing the harm of misinformation. For instance, once false information is out there, it tends to stick. It’s difficult to catch up, correct and stop people from relying on it.

To understand how such psychological resistance against misinformation can be achieved, we turned to inoculation theory. Inoculation theory, often regarded as the grandfather theory of persuasion, was developed by William McGuire and colleagues in the 1960s. It suggests that the process of building resistance against persuasion follows the biological analogy of an immunization process. Just as a small dosage of a weakened strain triggers the antibody production against the pathogen, pre-bunking – pre-emptively debunking weakened forms of persuasion – can help to build resistance against future persuasion attacks.

The study considers Cambridge University’s GoViral! game and UNESCO’s #ThinkBeforeSharing campaign as the two ‘pre-bunking’ interventions. What makes these interventions effective inoculating people against misinformation, what are the differences that should be noted, and what further steps should be considered in future interventions?

Inoculation or pre-bunking interventions usually contain two key elements: a warning of an impending persuasive attack, and a pre-emptive refutation. Both the game and the #ThinkBeforeSharing infographics contain these elements by first warning readers/players of the threat of COVID-19 misinformation, and then refuting it before people actually encounter the misinformation online.

Our research shows that both interventions improve people’s ability to spot COVID-19 misinformation in social media content and improves their confidence in their ability to do so. Study participants who played Go Viral! also indicated being less willing to share COVID-19 misinformation with others post-intervention.

The main difference between the interventions is that the #ThinkBeforeSharing infographics are what’s called a ‘passive’ pre-bunking intervention, whereas the game is an example of ‘active’ inoculation. In passive interventions, people are provided with the refutation without having to explicitly engage in generating their own counterarguments against the misinformation. Conversely, active inoculation interventions prompt people to actively refute the ‘weakened dose’ of misinformation; in the game, this works by letting players make choices and gain or lose ‘likes’ based on their performance.

In terms of the results, we find that both the infographics and the game work as intended, but the effect sizes for the game are larger. Also, we followed up with our study participants one week after the initial study, and found that the ‘inoculation’ effect was mostly retained for game players, but had pretty much (although not entirely) dissipated for infographics readers.

To us, this shows that both interventions are useful in their respective context; the game may have more longevity than the infographics in terms of conferring resistance against misinformation, but the intervention is much longer (five to seven minutes) and not everyone wants to play a game (although it does make the topic of misinformation more engaging and fun), whereas reading the infographics takes less time and is more easily implemented in social media environments.

In your opinion, how could pre-bunking as a preventive measure against misinformation be mainstreamed for more people, and especially students? How could teachers and trainers be best equipped to develop these skills and competencies?

There is a degree of overlap between pre-bunking and media literacy; while Go Viral! was not designed explicitly for use in education, we of course encourage this. Like the #ThinkBeforeSharing infographics, the game was designed to be freely accessible to all, and in as many languages as possible. Rather than telling people what to believe and share online, the game allows players to ‘learn by doing’. Thus, the game could be featured as part of media literacy curricula to demonstrate and inoculate against common misinformation techniques that make content go viral.

The game features three such techniques: using emotional language to evoke strong emotions like fear or outrage, the use of fake experts to artificially boost the credibility of false claims, and spreading conspiracy theories that place the blame for a particular problem on a small, secretive and nefarious group of people. These techniques are commonly found in online content, and we see the game as a useful tool for educators to teach students about how to spot and resist manipulative content when navigating the internet. For younger children, we’ve also developed ‘junior’ fake news games such as Bad News Junior for the US and UK-oriented education systems.

Inoculation against misinformation depends on developing critical thinking skills and tools. How can behavioural psychology inform media information and literacy and education that inoculates against misinformation and conspiracy theories? 

A large literature exists on the benefits of simulations and games in achieving educational outcomes. Systematic reviews have pointed to the fact that serious games like Bad News can boost motivation and facilitate learning and understanding through increased cognitive engagement. This is partly due to the fact that games enhance motivation by letting people immerse themselves into a virtual identity and tap into basic psychological needs of competence (understanding, learning, goals, challenges), autonomy (flexibility to choose, create your own path) and relatedness (feedback, interaction).

We very deliberately choose to focus on inoculating people against the ways in which people are commonly deceived or manipulated online. If you can recognize manipulation techniques in content, you’re better equipped to make your own judgement as to how reliable it is. Over the course of numerous studies, this method has been shown to be a robust way of improving people’s general resilience against misinformation. This approach is also more scalable than focusing on individual conspiracies or examples of misinformation. Educators seeking to design a media literacy course might be interested in seeing how this approach might be applicable to what they’re doing.

In addition to ‘pre-bunking’, what measures could complement this strategy or make up for limitations in inoculation as an approach, and how could people take up and implement these measures in their online activities?

There are numerous approaches unrelated to inoculation/pre-bunking that are currently being implemented on social media platforms, such as providing accuracy prompts and social norms interventions. Outside of behavioural science, calls to look at social media companies’ attention-based algorithms as possible amplifiers of misinformation are becoming more and more prevalent. Also, educational and fact-checking initiatives are gaining popularity worldwide.

We see inoculation interventions as one component of a multi-layered defence system against misinformation, so we are generally happy to see these developments take place.

• More on UNESCO’s #ThinkBeforeSharing campaign

URL:

https://en.unesco.org/news/qa-inoculating-against-covid-19-misinformation