Harmony Square

Roozenbeek, J., & van der Linden, S. (2020). Breaking Harmony Square: A game that “inoculates” against political misinformation. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-47
 * "players learn about 5 manipulation techniques commonly used in the spread of political media content: trolling, using emotional language, polarizing audiences, spreading conspiracy theories, and artificially amplifying the reach of their content through bots and fake likes"
 * "Similar to Bad News, playing Harmony Square builds cognitive resistance against common forms of manipulation that people may encounter online by preemptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of these techniques in a controlled environment. Unlike Bad News, Harmony Square is an election game that focuses specifically on how misinformation can be used to achieve political polarization (Bessi et al., 2016; Shao et al., 2017), for example, by fueling outgroup hostility"
 * "we first calculated the difference between the average score on all 3 of these questions for all 8 “real fake news” and all 8 “fictional fake news” social media posts that we used as measures (see the “methods” section) before and after the intervention, for each participant. We call this the “pre-post difference score.” We then checked if these difference scores for the treatment group were significantly different from the control group for each outcome variable, using an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)."
 * "To test if Harmony Square improves people’s ability to spot manipulative online content, we conducted a 2 (treatment vs control) by 2 (pre vs post) mixed design randomized controlled trial. ... Following the methodology established in prior research on “fake news” games (Basol et al., 2020; Maertens et al., 2020; Roozenbeek, Maertens, et al., 2020; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019), we measured reliability judgments of social media posts containing misinformation, both before and after the intervention on a 1-7 Likert scale."
 * "Overall, we find that people who play the game find misinformation significantly less reliable after playing, are significantly more confident in their assessment, and are significantly less likely to report sharing misinformation"
 * "Finding 1: People who play Harmony Square find manipulative social media content significantly less reliable after playing compared to a control group."
 * "Finding 2: People who played Harmony Square are significantly more confident in their ability to spot manipulative content in social media posts, compared to a control group."
 * "Finding 3: People who played Harmony Square are significantly less likely to report sharing manipulative social media content with others."