INOCULATING AGAINST FAKE NEWS? FEATURE
occurs, psychological inoculation stimulates the generation of counter-arguments that prevent subsequent misinformation from sticking. The inoculation idea can be illustrated with an example from climate change. Although there is a pervasive scientific consensus – reliant on 150-year- old basic physics and 15,000 modern scientific articles – that the Earth is warming from the burning of fossil fuels, political operatives often seek to undermine that consensus to introduce doubt about those scientific facts in the public’s mind. Ullrich Ecker and ourselves showed that people
can be inoculated against those disinformation efforts by presenting them with (1) a warning that attempts are made to cast doubt on the scientific consensus for political reasons, and (2) an explanation that one disinformation technique involves appeals to dissenting ‘fake experts’ to feign a lack of consensus. We illustrated the ‘fake-expert’ approach by revealing the attempts of the tobacco industry to undermine the medical consensus about the health risks from smoking with advertising claims such as ‘20,679 Physicians say ‘Luckies are less irritating’’. By exposing the fake-expert disinformation
strategy at the outset, the subsequent misinformation (in this case, the feigned lack of consensus on climate change) was defanged and people’s responses did not differ from a control condition that received no misinformation about the consensus. (Whereas in the absence of inoculation, that misinformation had a detrimental effect.) Misinformation sticks and is hard to dislodge.
But we can prevent it from sticking in the first place by alerting people to how they might be misled. n
Although there is a pervasive scientific consensus that the Earth is warming from the burning of fossil fuels, political operatives often seek to undermine that consensus to introduce
doubt about those scientific facts in the public’s mind.
i
Stephan Lewandowsky is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol. Dr Sander van der Linden is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Cambridge and Dr John Cook is a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
This article first appeared in CREST Security Review issue 08:
www.crestsecurityreview.com/article/can-we-inoculate-against- fake-news
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WINTER 2018 SOCIETY NOW 17
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