A way of improving people’s ability to resist misinformation has been uncovered by a new University of Oxford study.
The research found targeted psychological interventions, dubbed “psychological booster shots,” significantly improve long-term resistance to misinformation.
These interventions improve memory retention and help individuals to better recognise and resist misleading information over time.
Dr Rakoen Maertens from the university’s Department of Experimental Psychology, said: “Misinformation is a persistent global challenge, influencing everything from climate change debates to vaccine hesitancy.
“Our research shows that just as medical booster shots enhance immunity, psychological booster shots can strengthen people’s resistance to misinformation over time.
“By integrating memory-boosting techniques into public education and digital literacy programmes, we can help people retain these critical skills for much longer.”
The researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, and Potsdam universities, as well as King’s College London, conducted five large-scale experiments involving more than 11,000 participants to evaluate the durability of different types of interventions and seek ways to bolster their effects.
The research team tested three types of misinformation-prevention methods – text-based interventions, video-based interventions, and gamified interventions.
Those in the text-based intervention group read pre-emptive messages that explained common misinformation tactics.
Participants in the video-based intervention group watched short educational clips that exposed emotional manipulation techniques used in misleading content.
Lastly, those in the gamified intervention group played an interactive game that taught them to spot misinformation tactics by having them create their own fictional fake news stories.
Participants were then exposed to misinformation and evaluated on their ability to detect and resist it over time.
The study found while all three interventions were effective, their effects quickly diminished over time.
However, providing “booster” interventions, such as a follow-up reminder or reinforcement message, helped to maintain misinformation resistance for a substantially longer period.
The longevity of misinformation resistance was primarily driven by how well participants remembered the original intervention.
Follow-up reminders or memory-enhancing exercises were also found to significantly extend the effectiveness of the initial intervention, much like medical booster vaccines.
In contrast, boosters that did not focus on memory, but rather increased participants’ motivation to defend themselves by reminding them of the threat of misinformation, had no measurable benefits for the longevity of the effects.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, chair in cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol and a co-author of the study, said: “It is important that the effects of the inoculation interventions were nearly the same for videos, games, and text-based material.
“This makes it much easier to roll out inoculation at scale and in a broad range of contexts to boost people’s skills in recognising when they are being misled.”
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