Summary: A new study reveals that short memory-focused interventions can help individuals resist misinformation, retain these skills for a long period of time, and act as “psychological booster shots.” The study evaluated text-based messaging, videos and interactive games that teach people how to find and resist misleading information.
Memory-focused interventions show greatest long-term efficacy, suggesting that regular psychological “boosters” can increase misinformation resistance. Researchers highlight that these ways of reinforcing memory can have significant benefits for public education and digital literacy programs, addressing misinformation challenges such as health, politics and more.
Important Facts:
Memory Problems: The effectiveness of misinformation resistance is directly linked to the way in which individuals remember early training interventions.
Source: Oxford University
New research has found that targeted psychological interventions can significantly increase long-term resistance to misinformation.
These interventions, known as “psychological booster shots,” improve memory retention and help individuals more effectively recognize and resist misleading information over time.
The study, published in Nature Communications, explores how a variety of approaches, including text-based messaging, videos, and online gaming, can inoculate people from misinformation.
Researchers from Oxford University, Cambridge, Bristol, Potsdam and King’s College London conducted five large-scale experiments with over 11,000 participants to investigate the durability of these interventions and identify ways to enhance their effectiveness.
The researchers tested three different methods of reinventing false information.
Text-based intervention. Participants read preemptive messages explaining common false information tactics. A short educational clip exposes video-based interventions, emotional manipulation techniques used in misleading content.
Participants were then exposed to misinformation and were assessed for their ability to detect and resist it over time. In this study, all three interventions were effective, but their effects decreased rapidly over time, prompting questions about long-term effects.
However, providing memory-enhancing “booster” interventions, such as follow-up reminders and enhanced messages, has helped to maintain the resistance to misinformation for much longer.
In this study, we found that the lifespan of misinformation resistance is driven primarily by how well participants remembered the original intervention.
It was also found that follow-up reminders or memory-enhancing exercises, similar to medical booster vaccines, significantly enhanced the efficacy of initial interventions.
In contrast, researchers found that they focused on not on memory-focused boosters, but on increasing motivation for participants to protect themselves by reminding people of the looming threat of misinformation.
Dr. Lacon Maertens, a principal investigator at the Faculty of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, said:
“Our research shows that just as medical booster shots boost immunity, psychological booster shots can strengthen people’s resistance to misinformation over time. By integrating memory boosting technology into public education and digital literacy programs, we can help people retain these critical skills much longer.”
Professor Stephen Lwandowski, chairman of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol and co-author of the study, emphasized the generality of the findings.
He states: “It is important that the impact of vaccination interventions is roughly the same in video, gaming and text-based material. This makes it much easier to deploy vaccinations on a large scale and in a wide range of contexts, and helps people to improve their skills in realizing that people are being misunderstood.”
This study highlights the urgent need for scalable and durable misinformation interventions, highlights the importance of collaboration between researchers, policymakers and social media platforms, and integrates these insights into public information campaigns.
About this psychological research news
Author: Christopher McIntyre
Source: Oxford University
Contact: Christopher McIntyre – Oxford University
Image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
Rakoen Maertens et al. Natural Communication
Abstract
Memory-targeted psychological booster shots increase long-term resistance to false information
More and more real-world interventions aim to preemptively protect or inoculate people from misinformation. Vaccination studies have shown a positive effect on the resilience of misinformation when measured immediately after treatment via message, gaming, or video.
However, little is currently known about its long-term efficacy and the mechanism by which such treatments break down over time.
We begin by proposing three possible models of mechanisms that promote resistance to misinformation. We then report five pre-registered longitudinal experiments (NTOTAL = 11,759) examining the effectiveness of psychological vaccination interventions over time.
Text-based and video-based inoculation interventions may remain effective for a month. This is that game-based interventions appear to collapse more quickly, and we find that memory-enhancing booster interventions can reduce the impact of reflective interventions.
Finally, we propose an integrated memory change model, and suggest that misinformation researchers benefit from integrating knowledge from the cognitive science of memory, and designing better psychological interventions that can counter the misinformation in a long-term way in a way that is inbearable.
