Prebunking and inoculation against misinformation

Pre-emptive interventions applied before exposure to misinformation to reduce susceptibility to false claims. Builds on psychological inoculation theory — exposing people to weakened forms of persuasive arguments and explaining the techniques used to mislead them. Includes warnings, generic refutation techniques, and specific counterarguments.

Key papers

• van der Linden, Roozenbeek & Compton (2020) — Inoculating Against Fake News About COVID-19 — perspective on applying inoculation theory to COVID-19 misinformation; documents scope of pandemic infodemic and endorses active inoculation via the Bad News game and Go Viral! as scalable prebunking interventions
• van der Linden et al. (2017) — Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change — large-scale experiments (N=2,167) testing attitudinal inoculation against consensus-messaging competitors; demonstrates that pre-emptive warnings about misleading tactics and specific refutations preserve two-thirds of consensus messaging effect across political spectrum
• Cook, Lewandowsky & Ecker (2017) — Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence — two randomized experiments on climate change misinformation (false-balance media coverage and fake-expert arguments) demonstrating that pre-exposure to explanations of misleading techniques neutralizes misinformation and reduces polarization; effectiveness holds across political worldviews
• Roozenbeek & van der Linden (2019) — Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation — large-scale empirical study (N=15,000) demonstrating that a gamified ~15-minute intervention teaching six common misinformation production techniques significantly reduces perceived reliability of fake news across education, age, and political ideology
• Ecker et al. (2022) — The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction — synthesis of inoculation theory, empirical evidence on prebunking effectiveness, and practical implementation across domains