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Key points
- In a new book, Sander van der Linden has done excellent research on the effectiveness of inoculating people against misinformation.
- However, immunology metaphors are limited in their ability to explain how misinformation works and spreads.
- Additional ways of fighting misinformation include critical thinking, motivational interviewing, institutional change, and political action.
Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems for false claims about voting irregularities. But misinformation rarely gets severely punished, and it remains an enormous problem in many domains, including medicine, climate change, and politics. Strategies for fighting misinformation and disinformation (i.e., misinformation that is deliberately spread by people who know it is false) are desperately needed.
Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge University psychologist, has written a useful book about how to prevent falsehoods from harming society: Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity. He describes clever new methods for inoculating people against misinformation. The book is engagingly written and full of excellent illustrations of the harms of misinformation and alternatives to the spread of misinformation.
Van der Linden and his colleagues have done experiments that diminish the effects of misinformation by having people play video games where they set out to mislead others. By applying common tricks used to get people to believe falsehoods, people can become wary of the tricks and protect themselves in the future. These findings are psychologically interesting and practically useful, so the book is worth reading for anybody who is concerned about fighting misinformation.
However, the book has two main limitations: The inoculation metaphor is overdone, and important additional ways of fighting misinformation are neglected.
Metaphors can be important contributors to scientific thinking in examples such as Darwin’s natural selection and sound and light waves. But when overextended, they can become highly misleading: for example, in Richard Dawkins’ suggestion that genes are selfish. Van der Linden assumes that the spread of ideas is basically like the spread of germs so that we can inoculate people against bad ideas in the same way that we vaccinate people against pathogens, such as the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. But the mental mechanisms of belief, communication, inference, and memory are very different from the immunological mechanisms of infection, replication, and immune-system response to viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens.
The analogy has been useful to researchers for suggesting that exposing people to misinformation is a way of lessening their susceptibility to it, but it neglects many other techniques that are useful for finding this information.
How to “innoculate” people against misinformation
Van der Linden gives some excellent recommendations about dealing with misinformation (even if he does call them “antigens,” which is misleading and exaggerates the extent to which information and misinformation fall under the immunology metaphor):
1. Make the truth fluent and familiar.
2. Incentivize accuracy.
3. Learn the tell-tale signs of conspiracy theories.
4. Minimize the continued influence of misinformation.
5. Break the virality of misinformation on social media.
6. Avoid echo chambers and filters.
7. Be aware of micro-targeting of susceptible individuals open to persuasion.
8. Inoculate against misinformation by refuting weakened doses of fake news.
9. Identify and prebunk (do preemptive debunking of) the manipulation by discrediting, emotion, polarization, impersonation, conspiracy, and trolling.
10. Help spread inoculation against misinformation.
11. Inoculate friends and family.
Here are some other ways of dealing with information independent of the inoculation metaphor:
1. Spot pieces of misinformation by noticing that they contradict what is already well-known.
2. Locate the source of the information and determine whether it has a track record of spreading lies or truths.
3. Examine the motives of the source. Does it care about the truth, or is it simply furthering its own ends? Motivated reasoning is a major cause of misinformation.
4. Deal with misinformation by providing facts that correct it.
5. When simply pointing out errors does not work, use the techniques of critical thinking that have been developed in philosophy and psychology. Critical thinking operates with a two-step process of identifying thinking errors and correcting them using normatively preferable methods of thinking.
6. An alternative to critical thinking, more like psychotherapy than logic, is to use empathy and understanding to get at why people hold the beliefs they do, a technique called motivational interviewing.
7. When these psychological approaches won’t work, try social interventions, including changing social institutions. For example, social media networks are notoriously powerful at spreading misinformation by engaging people emotionally. Social pressure and legislation are required to change their practices.
8. Finally, political actions such as voting into power responsible leaders and legislators can be an important way of reducing misinformation.
These methods are hardly foolproof for dealing with misinformation, but they provide a much broader set of ways of combatting it than inoculation.
