“Psychological Booster Shots” Could Inoculate Against Misinformation

“Misinformation is a threat to society and the functioning of democracies worldwide,” the paper begins. “It is shown to have impacted a wide variety of critical issues such as vaccine uptake, support for mitigation of anthropogenic global warming, and political elections. Furthermore, misinformation has also been linked to real-world violence, such as mob violence in India and the burning of 5G installations.”

So, the question is: how do we combat it? Most of the work so far has focused on post-hoc measures – debunking pseudoscience, for example, or fact-checking political lies. Those can be pretty effective, under the right circumstances – but just as a measles vaccine is hugely preferable to suffering through the disease, perhaps a more proactive approach is needed to protect against all the bullshit surrounding us today.

To test this hypothesis, researchers conducted five large-scale experiments testing three different types of intervention on more than 11,000 participants. Some were text-based, where study participants read a message explaining common misinformation tactics; others were video-based, where they watched short clips covering how emotionally manipulative rhetoric is used to mislead. Finally, there were game-based interventions, where participants played Bad News, a free browser game in which players take on the role of a fake news producer – basically, letting them figure out for themselves how and why common misinformation techniques are used in the wild.

But would such “inoculation” measures be effective? Well, yes and no: when exposed to misinformation after the fact, participants were certainly better able to detect and resist it – but not for all that long. “The effect of specific text-based interventions can stay intact for about a month,” the researchers discovered, “whereas the effects for the gamified and video-based interventions lost significance within the first two weeks.”

While that may sound like bad news, the team suggests an obvious solution: booster shots. To go back to the physical health analogy: if misinformation is a virus, then our “immune systems” are our memory – and the equivalent of your annual flu shot? Just a regular reminder of how bad actors work.

“Just as medical booster shots enhance immunity, psychological booster shots can strengthen people’s resistance to misinformation over time,” explained Rakoen Maertens, a researcher in the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology and lead researcher on the project, in a statement. “By integrating memory-boosting techniques into public education and digital literacy programs, we can help people retain these critical skills for much longer.”

Even better: the benefits may be cumulative. “Multiple booster interventions may be needed to counteract misinformation in real world scenarios,” the paper admits, “but also […] forgetting may flatten out when enough booster interventions are provided. In other words, in line with what would be expected from the memory literature, long-term retention could be achieved through repeated inoculation.”

It’s much more than just a neat insight into how our brains retain information – although it is indeed that. The discovery that misinformation can be thwarted with short-term interventions, rather than purely through wholesale policy changes, means far more ways to tackle the problem – ones that are easy to roll out, and easy to take part in.

“Misinformation researchers would benefit from integrating knowledge from the cognitive science of memory to design better psychological interventions that can counter misinformation durably over time and at-scale,” the team writes.

Using their research, they suggest, “researchers and practitioners can develop ways to increase the long-term effectiveness of interventions by focusing on boosting memory.”

The paper is published in the journal Nature Communications.