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Psychology & interventionsDetection methods
Measuring and Reducing Misinformation SusceptibilityJon Roozenbeek presents two major contributions: (1) the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST), a psychometrically validated 20-item measure of how well people distinguish true from false headlines, and (2) findings that video-based inoculation interventions teaching manipulation techniques significantly improve people's ability to…
Psychology & interventionsDetection methods
Why People Believe Misinformation — and What We Can Do About ItJon Roozenbeek synthesizes eight years of misinformation research, examining why people believe false information and what interventions actually work. Grounding the analysis in the historical tobacco disinformation playbook, he argues that misinformation susceptibility stems not primarily from poor reasoning, but from media consumption…
Psychology & interventionsFact-checking & verification
Psychological Inoculation Against MisinformationSander van der Linden introduces psychological inoculation as a scalable alternative to fact-checking for building societal resistance to misinformation. Drawing on inoculation theory and his flagship intervention, the Bad News game, he demonstrates how preemptively exposing people to weakened examples of six core manipulation techniques…
Psychology & interventionsDetection methods
Prebunking Misinformation on Social MediaJon Roozenbeek presents the case for prebunking—teaching people to recognize manipulation tactics before encountering false claims—rather than relying on reactive debunking. Drawing on inoculation theory from the 1960s, he argues that manipulation techniques recur across misinformation campaigns: emotional exploitation, false…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Mis- and Disinformation During Crisis EventsKate Starbird, associate professor at UW's HCDE and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, discusses how misinformation and disinformation spread during crisis events, with case studies from the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 election. She distinguishes between harmful misinformation (false but well-intentioned), disinformation…
Psychology & interventionsDetection methods
Why People Fall for MisinformationJoseph Isaac traces how misconceptions persist using the tongue map myth as exemplar: David Hänig's 1901 research found modest taste-sensitivity variations across tongue regions, but through translation barriers, visual simplification, and our preference for clean narratives, it became the false claim that sweetness is imperceptible at…
Psychology & interventionsDetection methods
Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural prebunking against COVID-19 misinformationJon Roozenbeek presents a cross-cultural randomized controlled trial testing two psychological interventions against COVID-19 misinformation. Comparing the "Go Viral" game (technique-based inoculation) against UNESCO infographics and a Tetris control condition across 1,777 participants in the UK, Germany, and France, he demonstrates that…
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
How to Pre-Bunk Misinformation and DisinformationJon Roozenbeek discusses psychological inoculation as a scalable defense against misinformation. Rather than focusing on veracity (which becomes politically contested), he proposes teaching people to recognize predictable manipulation techniques before encountering false content.
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
Prebunking and Inoculating Against DisinformationVan der Linden argues that reactive fact-checking fails to scale and leaves misinformation's psychological influence intact. Instead, he proposes psychological inoculation: preemptively exposing people to weakened examples of misinformation techniques before they encounter the real thing, building cognitive resistance.
Platforms, policy & societyFact-checking & verification
How Polarization Can Help Solve the Misinformation ProblemDavid Rand presents a counter-intuitive argument: while polarization is widely viewed as exacerbating misinformation, it may actually improve crowd-sourced fact-checking systems like Twitter's Birdwatch/Community Notes. Rather than a traditional technology approach (machine learning classifiers), platforms can scale fact-checking by…
Psychology & interventionsPlatforms, policy & society
The Misinformation AgeFalse beliefs persist and spread through social factors—conformity, institutional curation of evidence, and network structure—rather than individual cognitive biases alone. O'Connor examines historical cases (variolation in 18th-century England, tobacco industry strategy) and mathematical models to show how unbiased actors (journalists,…
Psychology & interventionsLLMs & generative AI
Misinformation and Data LiteracyData and numbers are surprisingly effective misinformation tools because they convey false authority and precision—people trust numbers even more than words. West illustrates how charts can deliberately mislead through axis manipulation, bin-width distortion, and selective framing; these occur regularly in mainstream media and academic…