Where Do Librarians Fit in the Effort to Improve Mental Immunity?

Imagine a classroom of first-year college students, grouped into teams of four, heatedly debating which misleading Tweet will end up scoring them the most followers. Just ten minutes earlier, at the beginning of class, they were slumped and glassy-eyed in their seats, daydreaming about being elsewhere. Now they argue excitedly over whether a mundane Tweet about movie-going statistics or a deliberately false Tweet about the government’s mismanagement of crime, will entice Twitter users more. When you inform them that the false Tweet gets more followers (and, therefore, more points), there are groans — and cheers — throughout the room.

This is the scene in the class sessions in which I teach using a misinformation inoculation game called “Chaos Creator,” based on the successful “Bad News” game created by Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden at Cambridge University. The goal of the game is to help students identify misinformation persuasion techniques in the simulated game environment of the classroom so that they will be better able to identify the same techniques in the real world.

More Americans than ever believe something should be done about the spread of misinformation.¹ Even while we fall victim to misinformation, we recognize its negative impacts on personal and societal decision-making. At the same time, trust in authoritative sources of information, such as the government, the media, and scientists, has been falling, leading to a general mistrust of information that does not intuitively “feel right” to some.² These two trends reinforce one another, with a fear of misinformation spurring a distrust of authoritative information sources, and a rejection of authoritative information contributing to increased adoption of misinformed beliefs.

This is clearly a crisis with frightening implications. Yet, through all of this, research also shows that Americans generally do still trust librarians.³ In fact, many have pointed to librarians and information literacy as a solution to the spread of misinformation and the distrust of authoritative information sources.⁴ Librarians teach patrons in a variety of settings — for instance, in the case of university/college librarians, in invited information literacy instruction sessions conducted in college and university classes. With wide access to a variety of patrons and the advantage of being considered trustworthy, librarians are optimally positioned to make a positive impact in the fight against misinformation.  

One of the misinformation-fighting tactics supported by a growing body of evidence is misinformation “inoculation.” Also called “prebunking,” misinformation inoculation can serve the function of heightening people’s skepticism, slowing their thought processes down to engage in better metacognition, and increasing their ability to more accurately judge between true and false claims. The idea is based on the metaphor that, just as a vaccine can prime a person’s body to identify a pathogen before it infects them, people’s minds can be primed to reject misinformation before they encounter it.⁵ Misinformation inoculation typically begins with a warning that students will be imminently exposed to misinformation, which “activates” their skepticism (or “immune system”). Then, the misinformation is explained in a “weakened” form (much like exposure to an attenuated virus in the case of a biological vaccine), with an emphasis typically on the underlying persuasive mechanism by which others come to believe it. Finally, if and when an inoculated individual is exposed to the misinformation in its “natural context,” they will be more likely to experience an “immune response” to it, i.e., to take a skeptical stance toward it, rather than immediately believing it. Growing evidence exists that misinformation inoculation strategies can be effective at conferring resistance to persuasive, false messages.⁶ Cognitive immunity — the name for this newly emerging science of mental immunity — has a lot of potential to combat the dangerous and alarming side effects of misinformation sharing.⁷

The more I learn about mental immunity and misinformation inoculation, the more I see a role for librarians in addressing the spread of misinformation in a meaningful, evidence-based way. In the last few years, I myself became interested in exploring how this could be done as a part of my teaching responsibilities as an academic librarian, which started me on my journey to see how post-secondary students could be inoculated as a result of my information literacy instruction.

As previously mentioned, I decided to use the Bad News game, developed by Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden at Cambridge University, as a basis for my approach.⁸ The Bad News game has been rigorously studied and has been found to successfully inoculate players against misinformation persuasion techniques.⁹ It has also been translated into 19 languages and played over a million times.¹⁰ In the fictional Bad News game environment, the player must actually try to disseminate misinformation to others in order to gain followers, thereby learning how others successfully do this in the real world. To adapt this game to my instruction endeavors, I used the same inoculation strategy and “bad guy” point of view but had students form teams of 3–5 during a synchronous information literacy library session. Teams had to decide together what misleading Tweets to share in order to gain followers in the game. Each decision was followed by a breakdown of which manipulation tactic was being employed in the example. The team with the most followers at the end of the game won.

I have now run this game, which I call “Chaos Creator,” with over 400 students in my university’s First-Year Writing program. While the jury is still out on whether my particular approach to teaching misinformation inoculation is effective (my research is still underway), there is growing evidence that strategies like mine can be effective in the classroom.¹¹  

Besides having fun designing and delivering this modified version of the Bad News game, I also felt more confident that my approach was having a lasting, positive effect on students’ ability to detect misinformation. However, I also learned some lessons about how to effectively adapt the misinformation inoculation idea to teaching at the high school or postsecondary level.

First, traditional first-year college students do not have an intuitive sense of what red flags to look for when it comes to catching misinformation in claims made on social media. They struggled to identify the game’s misleading Tweets, and they couldn’t always recognize what made a Tweet problematic. In addition, students don’t encounter misinformation in the same places most adults do — many had never used Twitter, and I heard a lot of comments about TikTok, which is where a lot of students apparently encounter misinformation on a regular basis (whether they recognize it or not).

I also came to believe strongly that inoculation techniques like the one described above should be accompanied by instruction that explains how information sources create content, and what impact this has on their reliability. This is where conventional information and media literacy have a role, even though they require more time and are more complex to teach than prebunking. However, there is a real danger that raising students’ skepticism without care can lead to cynicism about the media landscape, which may send them down the dangerous path toward conspiracy theory thinking. Cynicism is very challenging to overcome, so it’s essential that, in addition to educating about misinformation, we teach students how to recognize content worthy of their trust as well.

Finally, while it might sound obvious, gamifying the inoculation technique results in an engaging and effective experience for students. Even the most lackluster class perked up when formed into teams and asked to make group decisions in a competitive environment. Fortunately, many misinformation inoculation games already exist, so introducing them to others can be a great first step in the inoculation process.

While there is still much work to do to explore how misinformation inoculation could be used by librarians and other instructors who are teaching about source evaluation, gamification of the strategy is a promising approach. Academic librarians often work with hundreds of students each semester, and the research shows that librarians are generally trusted authorities on information. There is serious potential for librarians to have a wide-reaching impact on students’ ability to detect misinformation, and researchers, educators, and other concerned stakeholders look to librarians to take on a greater role in this area. Hopefully, others continue to look to librarians for on-the-ground assistance in fighting the epidemic of misinformation as the field begins to explore the adoption of inoculation techniques and other evidence-based strategies.

References:

[1] Pew Research, “More Americans now say government should take steps to restrict false information online than in 2018,” Pew Research Center, accessed Nov 8, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/18/more-americans-now-say-government-should-take-steps-to-restrict-false-information-online-than-in-2018/

[2] Uri Friedman, “Trust Is Collapsing in America,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/trust-trump-americaworld/550964/; Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2021,” Pew Research Center - U.S. Politics & Policy (blog), May 17, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust-in-government-1958-2021/.

[3] A.W. Geiger, “Most Americans Say Libraries Can Help Them Find Reliable, Trustworthy Information,” Pew Research Center (blog), August 30, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/30/most-americans-especially-millennialssay-libraries-can-help-them-find-reliable-trustworthy-information/.

[4] Stephanie Beene and Katie Greer, “A Call to Action for Librarians: Countering Conspiracy

Theories in the Age of QAnon,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 47, no. 1 (2021); BW Becker, “The librarian’s information war,” Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian 35, no. 4 (2016): 188–191; Marcus Banks, “Fighting fake news: How libraries can lead the way on media literacy,” American Libraries, December 2016, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/12/27/fighting-fake-news/; Nicole Cooke, “Posttruth, truthiness, and alternative facts: Information behavior and critical information consumption for a new age,” The Library Quarterly, 87, no. 3 (2017): 211–221.

[5] Daniel Jolley and Karen M. Douglas. "Prevention is better than cure: Addressing anti‐vaccine conspiracy theories," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 47, no. 8 (2017): 459-469; John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich KH Ecker. "Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence," PloS one, 12, no. 5 (2017); Sander Van Der Linden, Edward Maibach, John Cook, Anthony Leiserowitz, and Stephan Lewandowsky. "Inoculating against misinformation," Science 358, no. 6367 (2017): 1141-1142 ; Sander van der Linden. "Misinformation: susceptibility, spread, and interventions to immunize the public," Nature Medicine 28, no. 3 (2022): 460-467.

[6] Daniel Jolley and Karen M. Douglas. "Prevention is better than cure: Addressing anti‐vaccine conspiracy theories," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 47, no. 8 (2017): 459-469; John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich KH Ecker. "Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence," PloS one, 12, no. 5 (2017); Sander Van Der Linden, Edward Maibach, John Cook, Anthony Leiserowitz, and Stephan Lewandowsky. "Inoculating against misinformation," Science 358, no. 6367 (2017): 1141-1142 ; Sander van der Linden. "Misinformation: susceptibility, spread, and interventions to immunize the public," Nature Medicine 28, no. 3 (2022): 460-467.

[7] Andy Norman, Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think (Harper Wave, 2021). Andy Norman. “What Is Cognitive Immunology?” Psychology Today (Apr 21, 2021). https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-immunity/202104/what-is-cognitive-immunology#:~:text=Cognitive%20immunology%20is%20the%20science,but%20they%20can%20quickly%20deteriorate; “CIRCE: The Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative,” (n.d.). https://cognitiveimmunology.net/

[8] Jon Roozenbeek & Sander van der Linden, “Bad News Game,” https://www.getbadnews.com/books/english/.

[9] Jon Roozenbeek and Sander Van der Linden. "Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation," Palgrave Communications, 5, no. 1 (2019): 1-10; Melisa Basol, Jon Roozenbeek, and Sander Van der Linden, "Good news about bad news: Gamified inoculation boosts confidence and cognitive immunity against fake news," Journal of Cognition, 3, no. 1 (2020); Rakoen Maertens, Jon Roozenbeek, Melisa Basol, and Sander van der Linden, "Long-term effectiveness of inoculation against misinformation: Three longitudinal experiments," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 27, no. 1 (2021).

[10] Jon Roozenbeek, Melisa Basol, and Sander van der Linden, ” A New Way to Inoculate People Against Misinformation,” Behavioral Scientist, Feb. 22, 2021. https://behavioralscientist.org/a-new-way-to-inoculate-people-against-misinformation/.

[11] Cook, John, Ullrich KH Ecker, Melanie Trecek-King, Gunnar Schade, Karen Jeffers-Tracy, Jasper Fessmann, Roozenbeek, Jon, and Sander Van Der Linden. "The fake news game: actively inoculating against the risk of misinformation." Journal of risk research 22, no. 5 (2019): 570-580; Sojung Claire Kim et al. "The cranky uncle game—Combining humor and gamification to build student resilience against climate misinformation." Environmental Education Research (2022): 1-17; Schubatzky, Thomas, and Claudia Haagen-Schützenhöfer. "Debunking Climate Myths Is Easy—Is It Really? An Explorative Case Study with Pre-Service Physics Teachers." Education Sciences 12, no. 8 (2022): 566.

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