Articles By

Jon Roozenbeek

Breaking Harmony Square: A game that “inoculates” against political misinformation

Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden

We present Harmony Square, a short, free-to-play online game in which players learn how political misinformation is produced and spread. We find that the game confers psychological resistance against manipulation techniques commonly used in political misinformation: players from around the world find social media content making use of these techniques significantly less reliable after playing, are more confident in their ability to spot such content, and less likely to report sharing it with others in their network. 

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Prebunking interventions based on “inoculation” theory can reduce susceptibility to misinformation across cultures

Jon Roozenbeek, Sander van der Linden and Thomas Nygren

This study finds that the online “fake news” game, Bad News, can confer psychological resistance against common online misinformation strategies across different cultures. The intervention draws on the theory of psychological inoculation: Analogous to the process of medical immunization, we find that “prebunking,” or preemptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation, can help cultivate “mental antibodies” against fake news.

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