Josh Compton

Josh Compton is Professor of Speech at Dartmouth College and Chair of the Speech at Dartmouth Steering Committee. He has been studying inoculation as a way to confer resistance to influence for more than 20 years. Persuasion inoculation is modeled after medical inoculation: a weakened form of a challenge motivates resistance to stronger challenges encountered later. Most of his work of late focuses on the theory itself—how it works, why it works, and whether it might work better. His applied work is mostly in mis- and disinformation, science communication, health communication, and sport. His scholarship appears in Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Annals of the International Communication Association, Human Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Frontiers in Psychology, PLOS ONE, and other academic journals. He authored the inoculation theory chapter in The Sage Handbook of Persuasion (Sage) and co-authored the inoculation theory chapter in Persuasion and Communication in Sport, Physical Activity, and Exercise (Taylor Francis). Josh has been an invited expert for the Department of Defense’s Strategic Multilayer Assessment program (USA) and NATO’s and USSOCOM’s Joint Senior Psychological Operations Conference and is a member of the Global Experts on Debunking of Misinformation group. He has been named Distinguished Lecturer by Dartmouth College and has won the Outstanding Professor Award from the National Speakers Association and has twice won the L. E. Norton Award for Outstanding Scholarship.