Inoculation and accuracy prompting increase accuracy discernment in combination but not alone

Gordon Pennycook; Adam J Berinsky; Puneet Bhargava; Hause Lin; Rocky Cole; Beth Goldberg; Stephan Lewandowsky; David G Rand

doi:10.1038/s41562-024-02023-2

Inoculation and accuracy prompting increase accuracy discernment in combination but not alone

Nat Hum Behav. 2024 Nov 4. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-02023-2. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Gordon Pennycook^{1

2}, Adam J Berinsky³, Puneet Bhargava^{4

5}, Hause Lin^{6

7}, Rocky Cole⁸, Beth Goldberg⁸, Stephan Lewandowsky^{9

10

11}, David G Rand^{7

12

13}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. [email protected].
² Hill/Levene Schools of Business, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. [email protected].
³ Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
⁵ Department of Marketing, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
⁶ Hill/Levene Schools of Business, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
⁷ Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁸ Jigsaw (Google), Mountain View, CA, USA.
⁹ School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
¹⁰ Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
¹¹ School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia.
¹² Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
¹³ Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.

PMID: 39496772
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02023-2

Abstract

Misinformation is a major focus of intervention efforts. Psychological inoculation-an intervention intended to help people identify manipulation techniques-is being adopted at scale around the globe. Yet the efficacy of this approach for increasing belief accuracy remains unclear, as prior work uses synthetic materials that do not contain claims of truth. To address this issue, we conducted five studies with 7,286 online participants using a set of news headlines based on real-world true/false content in which we systematically varied the presence or absence of emotional manipulation. Although an emotional manipulation inoculation did help participants identify emotional manipulation, there was no improvement in participants' ability to tell truth from falsehood. However, when the inoculation was paired with an intervention that draws people's attention to accuracy, the combined intervention did successfully improve truth discernment (by increasing belief in true content). These results provide evidence for synergy between popular misinformation interventions.