Abstract

The societal need to address belief in misinformation has inspired a range of promising psychological inoculation interventions to reduce its perceived credibility. This research simultaneously applies several recent extensions to psychological inoculation theory along with a testing paradigm that is new to the field. Two meta-analyses and numerous narrative reviews offer assessments of the interventions, but they are not well suited to answering a critical question: are they generally efficacious in psychologically inoculating against the persuasive influence of misinformation? This month brings the release of an internal meta-analysis of relevant studies by the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab (Simchon et al., in press; k = 33) and the final preparatory stages of a systematic review of characteristics of studies in this field (Loughnan et al., in preparation; k = 72). Taken together, these works offer a statistically robust answer to the enduring question of efficacy along with a framework for assessing the research from which the answer is drawn. The aim of this talk is to synthesize the findings of both analyses to determine the strength of the current evidence that these contemporary inoculation interventions psychologically inoculate against misinformation.