![]() ![]() Each tweet earns more followers and grows influence. In a web-based game called Bad News, a player pretends to be a “disinformation and fake news tycoon,” who then is invited to smear the government or mainstream media on Twitter. Joined by Jon Roozenbeek, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, van der Linden plotted out games to prime people’s ability to spot misinformation by offering a glimpse into what motivates someone to spread falsehoods in the first place. ![]() Rather than squander limited resources on endless rounds of whack-a-mole, van der Linden said McGuire’s ideas about neutralizing bad information before it spreads “seemed even more relevant now,” in the digital age. But those who encountered the original false information may never see it debunked, thus never knowing the truth. Fact-checkers must find evidence to disprove the flawed claim, then write down and share their arguments in articles, on social media and through television and radio appearances. And that false information enjoys a competitive advantage - it’s easier to write and designed for sensationalism and maximum sharing. Indeed, research suggests false news spreads six times faster than the truth. The internet’s rise has only enhanced the ways that misinformation can spread like a viral pathogen, van der Linden said. Often, these ideas returned despite being disproved, van der Linden said, because they bore one or more traits that help lies gain traction: polarizing messages designed to pit people against each other, fake experts who amplified a false message, emotion and conspiracy theories. For years, recycled myths easily spread through social and mainstream media, fueling climate denial, said van der Linden, who directs the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. More than five decades later, another social psychologist named Sander van der Linden stumbled across McGuire’s research in a library while exploring ways to snuff out misinformation about climate change. Inspired by how vaccines teach the body to fend off disease, McGuire argued that attitude inoculation, also called the theory of psychological immunization, could build up a person’s resistance to a persuasive but flawed idea by exposing them to weaker versions of that same idea that they learn to disarm. The idea of prebunking can be traced to social psychologist William McGuire’s research during the 1960s. Social scientists are testing how prebunking can be used to keep people from believing misinformation, but questions remain about how effective this tool can be and whether it could have widespread reach. During the 2020 presidential election, Twitter even gave it a shot. Rather than chasing lies and trying to persuade people who have already been convinced by them, researchers and public health officials are exploring ways to get ahead of those lies through a social psychology tool called prebunking. “Sowing doubt is much easier than resolving doubt,” said political scientist Adam Berinsky, who directs the Political Experiments Research Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. WATCH: States pull out all the stops in push to increase vaccinations And once a lie is out on the internet, it’s often impossible to contain. Correcting falsities demands a relatively small number of experts and researchers to tackle a mountain of misinformation. But misinformation threatens our progress on the pandemic by undermining confidence in the vaccines and science behind them.įact-checking and debunking can combat false news spread on social media, but they are simply not enough. Vaccines have played a vital role in slowing rates of new infection, hospitalization and death due to COVID-19. ![]()
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