ArticleScientific reports2023
Psychological inoculation protects against the social media infodemic.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Psychological inoculation against climate doom.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Intervening and reducing sharing of false cancer treatments on social media: Online experiment.PloS one · 2026Article
- Addressing misleading medical information on social media: a scoping review of current interventions.BMJ evidence-based medicine · 2025Article
- Pictorial warning labels reduce sharing intentions, blunt self-relevance processes elicited by social media posts promoting cannabis edibles.The Journal of communication · 2025Article
- Limited effectiveness of psychological inoculation against misinformation in a social media feed.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Inoculation reduces social media engagement with affectively polarized content in the UK and US.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Psychological inoculation strategies to fight climate disinformation across 12 countries.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Limits of functional illiteracy in explaining human misinformation: the knowledge illusion, values, and the dual process theory of thought.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- What Are They Thinking? Exploring College Students' Mental Processing and Decision-Making About COVID-19 (Mis)Information on Social Media.Journal of educational psychology · 2023Article
- Using psychological science to understand and fight health misinformation: An APA consensus statement.The American psychologistReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Misinformation can have a profound detrimental impact on populations' wellbeing. In this large UK-based online experiment (n = 2430), we assessed the performance of false tag and inoculation interventions in protecting against different forms of misinformation ('variants'). While previous experiments have used perception- or intention-based outcome measures, we presented participants with real-life misinformation posts in a social media platform simulation and measured their engagement, a more ecologically valid approach. Our pre-registered mixed-effects models indicated that both interventions reduced engagement with misinformation, but inoculation was most effective. However, random differences analysis revealed that the protection conferred by inoculation differed across posts. Moderation analysis indicated that immunity provided by inoculation is robust to variation in individuals' cognitive reflection. This study provides novel evidence on the general effectiveness of inoculation interventions over false tags, social media platforms' current approach. Given inoculation's effect heterogeneity, a concert of interventions will likely be required for future safeguarding efforts.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.