Fake news game confers psychological resistanceagainst online misinformation, Roozenbeek and van der Linden, 2019
Paper, Tags: #social-sciences, #humanities
We designed a psychological intervention in the form of an online browser game. Players take the role of a fake news producer and learn to master six documented techniques commonly used in the production if misinformation:
- Polarisation
- Invoking emotions
- Spreading conspiracy theories
- Trolling people online
- Deflecting blame
- Impersonating fake accounts
Preemptively exposing, warning and familiarising people with the strategies helps confer cognitive inmunity when exposed to real misinformation.
We provide initial evidence that people's ability to spot and resist misinformation improves after gameplay, irrespective of education, age, political ideology and cognitive style.
A broad array of solutions have been proposed to reduce the effeciveness of fake news, from making digital media literacy part of school curricula, to the automated verification of rumours using ML algorithms. But decades of research on human cognition says that misinformation isn't easily corrected.
It has been shown that false news spread faster and deeper than true information, so current research focuses on preemptive ways of mitigating the problem by preventing false narratives from taking root in memory in the first phase --> prebunking.
The idea is that by exposing people to a weakened version of a misleading argument, and by preemptively refuting this argument, attitudinal resistance can be conferred against futre deception attempts.
Inoculating studies such as studies focused on persuasion attempts, often refer to a particular topic, which presents fundamental problems of scalability and generalisability across issue domains.
Prior research has mainly relied on providing passive (reading) rather than active (experiential) inoculations. Participants are typically provided with the refutations to a certain misleading argument. But active refutation, where participants are prompted to actively generate pro-and counter-arguments, might be more effective.
We are the first to implement the principle of active inoculation in an entirely novel experiential learning context: the Fake News Game, a serious social impact game designed to entertain as well as educate. Accordingly, we developed a novel psychological intervention aiming to confer cognitive resistance against fake news strategies.
This game, called Bad Game, takes 15mins, simulates the spread of online news and media, and is choice based. Players take on the role of a fake news creator, trying to attract as many followers as possible while maximizing credibility.
- First badge: impersonation
- Second badge: provocative emotional content, producing material that deliberately plays into basic emotions in order to gain attention. Emotional content leads to higher engagement and is more likely to go viral
- Third badge teaches players about group polarization, artificially amplifying existing grievances and tensions between different groups in society
- Fourth badge: lets players float their own conspiracy theories, creating or amplifying alternative explanations for traditional news events which assume these events are controlled by a small, malicious secret elite group of people
- Fifth badge covers the process of discrediting opponents
- Sixth badge educates players about the practice of trolling people online. Originally, trolling means slowly dragging a lure from the back of a fishing vessel in the hope that the fish will bite. In misinformation, it means deliberately inciting a reaction from a target audience by using bait
We collected 43687 responses over three months which included 14266 completed paired pre-post resposes. Socio-demographic variables were measured during the test:
- Gender: female, male, oher
- Age: -18, 19-29, 30-49, 50+
- Political orientation: 7-point scale between very left-wing and very right-wing
- Highest education completed: high school or less, some college, higher degree
The general distribution of the sample was skewed toward males, higher educated, younger and somewhat-to-very-liberal.
The key dependent variable measured in the survey was respondents' ability to recognise misinformation strategies in the form of misleading tweets and news headlines. Participants were asked to rate the reliability of these tweets on a standard 7-point scale both before and after playing.
The reliability of news was measured. In the case of real news, reliability was high pre- and post- game and didn't vary much. In the fake ones, the reliability was 2.4-3 pre-game and 2-2.3 after.
Regarding socio-demographic features, right-wing people give a slightly higher reliability to fake news compared to left-wing people. This phenomenon is repeated with older people, more sensitive to fake news. Lower educated people had an almost uniform distribution of reliability pre-game, and slightly lower post.
The process of active inoculation through playing the Bad News game significantly reduces the perceved reliability of tweets that embedded several common online misinformation strategies. Active inoculation doesn't merely make participants more skeptical, but instead trains people to be more attuned to specific deception strategies in different contexts.
We find no meaningful changes between genders, education levels, age groups or political ideologies.
We also recognize the important possibility that participation rates may have been selectively higher among those audiences who would be more open to learning about fake news in the first place.
The dataset can be found here.