Drog - Bad News

(Basol, M. et al., 2020)
 * "We present a replication and extension into the effectiveness of Bad News as an anti-misinformation intervention. We address three shortcomings identified in the original study: the lack of a control group, the relatively low number of test items, and the absence of attitudinal certainty measurements."
 * "recent research has focused on the possibility of a “broad-spectrum vaccine” against misinformation (Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2018, 2019). The broad-spectrum approach requires two theoretical innovations; 1) shifting focus away from pre-emptively exposing participants to weakened examples of specific instances of (mis)information to pre-emptively exposing participants to weakened examples of the techniques that underlie the production of most misinformation and 2) revisiting McGuire’s original prediction (McGuire & Papageorgis, 1961) that active inoculation (letting participants generate their own “antibodies”) would be more effective in conferring resistance to persuasion than when participants are provided with a defensive pre-treatment in a passive manner."
 * "After treatment exposure, all participants were asked to complete the same set of outcome measures."
 * "Using a randomized design, multiple items, and measures of attitudinal certainty, we expand on the initial study by Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2019). Overall, we find clear evidence in support of the intervention. Whereas Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2019) reported an average effect-size of d = 0.52 for aggregated reliability judgments using a self-selected withinsubject design, we find very similar effect-sizes in a randomized controlled design (d = 0.60). The range in effect-sizes observed on the badge level (d = 0.14 to d = 0.58) are also similar to what Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2019) reported (d = 0.16 to d = 0.36), and can be considered sizeable in the context of resistance to persuasion research (Banas & Rains, 2010; Walter & Murphy, 2018). In fact, Funder and Ozer (2019) recommend describing these effects as medium to large and practically meaningful, especially considering the refutational-different rather than refutational-same approach adopted here, i.e. in the game, participants were trained on different misleading headlines than they were tested on pre-and-post. Moreover, the fictitious nature of the items help rule out potential memory confounds and the lack of variation on the measures (pre-post) in the control group should decrease concerns about potential demand characteristics. Importantly, consistent with Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2019), none of the main effects revealed an interaction with political ideology, suggesting that the intervention works as a “broad-spectrum” vaccine across the political spectrum. However, it is interesting that in both studies, the smallest effect is observed for the polarization badge. One potential explanation for the lower effect on polarization is confirmation bias: in the game, decisions can still be branched in an ideologically congenial manner. Given the worldview backfire effect (Lewandowsky et al., 2012), future research should evaluate to what extent inoculation is effective for ideologically congruent versus non-congruent fake news. Nonetheless, these results complement prior findings which suggest that susceptibility to fake news is the result of lack of thinking rather than only partisan motivated reasoning (Pennycook & Rand, 2019). Lastly, the current study also significantly advances our understanding of the theoretical mechanisms on which the intervention acts. For example, while inoculated individuals improved in their reliability assessments of the fake news items, the average confidence they expressed in their judgements also increased significantly and substantially. Importantly, the intervention only significantly increased confidence amongst those who updated their judgments in the right direction (i.e. correctly judging manipulative items to be less reliable). These findings are supported by previous literature demonstrating the certainty-bolstering effects of inoculation treatments (Tormala & Petty, 2004) and may suggest that confidence plays a key role in both prophylactic and therapeutic inoculation approaches. Yet, more research is required to identify whether an increase in confidence pertains to the fake items themselves or rather the ability to refute misinformation in general."

(Roozenbeek, J., van der Linden, S., 2019)
 * "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 and headlines on a standard 7-point scale (1 = unreliable, 7 = reliable), both before and after playing."
 * lack a traditional control group
 * the sample was self-selected (opt-in) and its composition is therefore unbalanced on several key demographics and not representative of any population
 * "We find preliminary evidence that the process of active inoculation through playing the Bad News game significantly reduced the perceived reliability of tweets that embedded several common online misinformation strategies. Although in absolute terms the standardised effect-sizes across the different badges may indicate a small to moderate effect, the observed magnitude is broadly in line with the average effect-size in the context of resistance to persuasion research (Banas and Rains, 2010; Walter and Murphy, 2018), where small effects are not only common but also meaningful, especially when aggregated across individuals over time (Funder and Ozer, 2019)."
 * the psychological “vaccine” only activates specific “antibodies”
 * "we find no (practically) meaningful differences in inoculation-effects across genders, education levels, age groups, or political ideologies. This is a notable finding in itself, as our goal was to develop an intervention that could be used as a”broad-spectrum vaccine” without causing psychological reactance. This result is further buttressed by the finding that those participants who were most susceptible to fake news headlines at the outset (pre-test) also benefited the most from the inoculation treatment. In other words, the vaccine may indeed help those audiences at greatest risk of misinformation. Of course, across the sample, the relatively modest susceptibility ratings indicate a possible floor effect among those who were already less likely to believe the fake headlines, as is common in fake news research (e.g., see Pennycook and Rand, 2018)."
 * "the question can be raised as to whether we are encouraging people to use these insights to spread fake news or deceive other people online (i.e., a negative side effect). Although not empirically tested, we deem this risk extremely low for two reasons. First, while the game shows how easy it can be to start spreading deceptive content, the primary motivations for doing so are often political or financial in nature (Kirby, 2016; Gu, Kropotov and Yarochkin, 2017), neither of which are motivations elicited or provided by the game. In addition, ramping up an influential fake news machinery is very different from learning what deceptive content looks like. Second, none of the strategies and techniques shown in the game are secret (NATO StratCom, 2017); they are already being used to spread ‘real’ fake news, the game is simply helping people gain resistance against them."