With all the talk about vaccines, I thought it was about time that I revise my superficial understanding of how they actually work (this wonderful 5-minute animation from TED-Ed did the trick).
It’s counterintuitive, which might contribute to why there are still so many people who refuse them. I certainly remember saying to my dad as he prepared to give me one of my childhood vaccines: “Whaaat? You’re injecting the virus into me?”. But as we’ve learned from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s seminal work, our intuitions frequently lead us astray.
In the 1960s in the aftermath of the Korean War, American social psychologist William McGuire was researching how to increase resistance to persuasion. Just as biological resistance to disease works by exposing people to a weakened form of a virus, he suggested that psychological resistance to persuasion might also work by exposing people to a weakened form of an “idea-virus”. Once again, it’s counterintuitive. But he confirmed his inoculation theory experimentally and it has been supported by research since, particularly in public health interventions such as reducing smoking among teenagers.
More recently, social psychologists such as Sander van der Linden and his collaborators have been working on applying inoculation theory to… fake news. As an excellent BBC write-up of their research says:
[They] call the approach ‘pre-bunking’. Instead of waiting for false information to spread and then laboriously fact-checking and debunking it, researchers go for a pre-emptive strike that has the potential to shield your brain.
In other words, if you’re forewarned that politically motivated groups might try to mislead you on a topic like, say, the origin of the coronavirus, you’re more likely to engage critical thinking and actually evaluate the fake news that you inevitably bump into.
Van der Linden and his team wanted to find a way to scale up the impact of their research. They came up with the idea of developing Bad News, a short online game in which you role-play a “master of disinformation”, amassing Twitter followers in your ambition to become a fake news tycoon. Their research based on an early prototype – with Dutch high school students on the controversial topic of the European refugee crisis – gave promising results, and the game is now available in 12 languages as well as in a kid-safe version (in English only).
So… are you ready to be inoculated?