Wang Sze Yuh Nina, Phillips Samantha C, Carley Kathleen M, Lin Hause, Pennycook Gordon
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
Software and Societal Systems, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15289, USA.
PNAS Nexus. 2025 May 28;4(6):pgaf172. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf172. eCollection 2025 Jun.
Psychological inoculation is a promising and potentially scalable approach to counter misinformation. The goal of inoculation is to teach people to recognize manipulation techniques, such as emotional language, commonly found in misinformation online. While there is substantial evidence that inoculation increases technique recognition when directly assessed, it is not clear if this effect transfers to spontaneous detection of techniques and disengagement with the associated content in real-life contexts. In particular, emotional appeals are abundant on social media and known drivers of attention and engagement. Therefore, we examined the effects of emotional language and emotional manipulation inoculation on attention and engagement in a simulated social media feed environment. Through five preregistered studies, we found that inoculation only decreased engagement with emotionally presented content when we solely presented synthetic content relevant to the task of identifying emotional manipulation. Any addition of real tweets or even synthetic tweets containing other manipulation techniques (e.g. ad hominem attacks) into the feed appeared to nullify the effect. Our results highlight the importance of assessing misinformation interventions in ecologically valid contexts to estimate real-world effects.
心理接种是一种很有前景且可能具有可扩展性的应对错误信息的方法。接种的目标是教导人们识别在线错误信息中常见的操纵技巧，比如情感化语言。虽然有大量证据表明，直接评估时接种能提高对技巧的识别能力，但尚不清楚这种效果是否能转化为在现实生活情境中对技巧的自发察觉以及与相关内容的脱离。特别是，情感诉求在社交媒体上大量存在，并且是吸引注意力和参与度的已知驱动因素。因此，我们在模拟社交媒体信息流环境中研究了情感化语言和情感操纵接种对注意力和参与度的影响。通过五项预先注册的研究，我们发现，只有当我们仅呈现与识别情感操纵任务相关的合成内容时，接种才会降低对情感化呈现内容的参与度。向信息流中添加任何真实推文，甚至包含其他操纵技巧（如人身攻击）的合成推文，似乎都会使这种效果无效。我们的结果凸显了在生态有效情境中评估错误信息干预措施以估计现实世界效果的重要性。
