Good News about Bad News: Gamified Inoculation Boosts Confidence and Cognitive Immunity Against Fake News
Open accessAbstract
Recent research has explored the possibility of building attitudinal resistance against online misinformation through psychological inoculation. The inoculation metaphor relies on a medical analogy: by pre-emptively exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation cognitive immunity can be conferred. A recent example is the Bad News game, an online fake news game in which players learn about six common misinformation techniques. 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. Using a 2 (treatment vs. control) × 2 (pre vs. post) mixed design (N = 196) we measure participants’ ability to spot misinformation techniques in 18 fake headlines before and after playing Bad News. We find that playing Bad News significantly improves people’s ability to spot misinformation techniques compared to a gamified control group, and crucially, also increases people’s level of confidence in their own judgments. Importantly, this confidence boost only occurred for those who updated their reliability assessments in the correct direction. This study offers further evidence for the effectiveness of psychological inoculation against not only specific instances of fake news, but the very strategies used in its production. Implications are discussed for inoculation theory and cognitive science research on fake news.
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The fake news game Bad News is a real-world inoculation intervention used by schools and governments that finds that pre-emptively exposing people to small doses of misinformation techniques, including scenarios about COVID-19, can reduce susceptibility to fake news.
“The fake news game Bad News is a real-world inoculation intervention (https://www. getbadnews.com) used by schools and governments that finds that pre-emptively exposing people to small doses of misinformation techniques (including scenarios about COVID-19) can reduce susceptibility to fake news 131,132”
From Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response (2020) · cites this paper as [131]
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- Authors
- Basol, M., Roozenbeek, J., & Van der Linden, S.
- Affiliations
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Venue
- Journal of Cognition
- Publisher
- Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
- Published
- 2020-01-10
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 2
- ISSN
- 2514-4820 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6952868
- OpenAlex
- W2998952654
- Cited by
- 368
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 50 · 2025: 61 · 2024: 60 · 2023: 71 · 2022: 59 · 2021: 39 · 2020: 27
- FWCI
- 65.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Cognition (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Apollo (University of Cambridge) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Apollo (cc-by)
- Funders
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (1734765)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Deception detection and forensic psychology
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Keywords
- psychological inoculation, fake news, misinformation, gamification, misinformation detection, confidence in judgments, cognitive immunity, online misinformation
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