ABSTRACT

There has been increasing concern with the growing infusion of misinformation, or “fake news”, into public discourse and politics in many western democracies. Our article first briefly reviews the current state of the literature on conventional countermeasures to misinformation. We then explore proactive measures to prevent misinformation from finding traction in the first place that is based on the psychological theory of “inoculation”. Inoculation rests on the idea that if people are forewarned that they might be misinformed and are exposed to weakened examples of the ways in which they might be misled, they will become more immune to misinformation. We review a number of techniques that can boost people’s resilience to misinformation, ranging from general warnings to more specific instructions about misleading (rhetorical) techniques. We show that based on the available evidence, inoculation appears to be a promising avenue to help protect people from misinformation and “fake news”.

摘要

在许多西方民主国家，错误信息或“假新闻”越来越多地渗透到公共话语和政治中，这引起了越来越多的关注。我们的文章首先简要回顾了有关错误信息的常规对策的文献现状。然后，我们探索了基于“接种”心理学理论的主动措施，以防止错误信息首先受到关注。接种基于这样一种想法，即如果人们预先警告他们可能会被误导，并接触到他们可能被误导的弱化例子，他们将更容易受到错误信息的影响。我们回顾了许多可以提高人们对错误信息的适应能力的技术，从一般警告到关于误导性（修辞）技术的更具体的说明。