The use of a kind of misinformation vaccine has helped to reduce the belief in false information about NOS and Brazil, indicates a new study. The effects of the strategy were modest but promising, as they appeared more clearly in the case of the most attached people to conspiracy theories on the subject.
Published on Friday (29) in the expert magazine, the data were collected and analyzed by the team of John Carey, from Dartmouth College (USA), in a group that also includes Brazilian Marília Gehrke of the University of Groningen.
The team conducted three experiments with a similar structure between October 2022 and February 2023, two of them with US voters and the other with Brazilian voters. The idea was to examine the effect of interventions on people’s vision about factors such as the correction of elections and the prevalence of electoral fraud in both countries.
The team’s work is based on a growing set of evidence that suggests the effectiveness of what certain researchers call “cognitive immunology.” It is an analogy with what happens, biologically speaking, in the case of vaccination.
As well as exposing the body to attenuated (weakened) forms of certain viruses or bacteria, or even to proteins or pieces of genetic material of these disease -causing materials, it is a strategy that “trains” the body to defend against them, through the production of antibodies and other preparation strategies, there are studies indicating that something of type is also possible to reduce the harmful effects of misinformation.
In studies on the subject, the technique is known in English as “prebinking”. It is a pun with “debunking” (an expression that means something like “deny something”), but with “PRE” at the beginning to indicate that it is a preventive strategy. In many cases, the “prebinking” works through the person’s initial exposure to misinformation, in a shape considered light (something like “see, candidate X has been saying that election Y was fraudulent”).
Shortly thereafter, however, the study participating receives a series of clear and detailed information explaining why conspiracy theory has no foundation, something like “in fact, there are many mechanisms that guarantee the reliability of the Y.
In the experiments described by the study at Science Advances, the international team of researchers compared the effects of the use of this “prebunking” model with another anti -inflation approach, the use of so -called “sources with credibility”.
Despite the generic name, it is not any source endowed with public credibility in general, such as experts or figures of authority. In such cases, the researchers choose public figures seen as allies of the propagator of misinformation, but which give clear statements against the conspiracy theory that wants to overthrow. In the experiments done with Americans, among these sources are, for example, judges affiliated with the Republican Party who publicly defended the fairness of the elections, contrary to.
The two approaches, the “prebinking” and the “sources with credibility”, were compared with each other and with an innocuous placebo, just as in the case of biological vaccines. (In this case, the placebo that the researchers used involved contact with texts such as “update about the news of the world”, “why doing walks is good for health” or “the use of sauces in the kitchen”).
In each study, the team recruited between 2,000 and 3,000 people, who participated through virtual platforms. Participants’ beliefs about the electoral process were analyzed before and after “treatment” with different approaches and placebo.
In general, what the team has found is that both anti -inflammation approaches tend to decrease the chances that people continue to believe conspiracy theories about fraudulent elections. However, the “prebinking” was a little more effective in both US and Brazil.
Considering the percentages of people who already trusted the electoral processes on each country, on the one hand, and voters who had totally embraced the thesis of fraud and manipulation, on the other, the researchers also found that the most intense effect was linked precisely to the most radical conspiracyists.
A simple explanation is that the most uninformed or more susceptible people are the ones that have the most room to change their beliefs
In the American case, for example, among Trump supporters, the belief in fake statements about election fraud fell from 41.3% of participants (those in the group that “received placebo”) to between 24.4% and 19% among those who had contact with the prebinking strategy. In the case of the general group, between 12.3% and 10.6% of those receiving “prebinking” continued to believe in fake statements, against 19.5% of members of the placebo group.
The variation in the second group has to do with the use of different “formulations” of the misinformation vaccine. In one formula, the first person was warned of the activity of conspiracy groups and the need to protect themselves against “”, and only then receive the correct information detailed about the electoral process. In the other, only the package with the accurate data came. For the researchers, this may indicate that the package with accurate information avoids arousing emotional reactions from supporters of a particular political group, which can lead them to are entrenched in their opinions.
Among the Brazilian participants, among those who were fierce supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, the confidence in the electoral results was 28% for those who received the prebinking, while only 20% in the control group.
According to Marília Gehrke, the reasons for the most positive results with these subgroups are not clear yet.
“It can be several factors. A simple explanation is that the most uninformed or more susceptible people are the ones that have the most room to change their beliefs,” she says. “Another possible explanation is that the information [correta] It can be very little familiar to them. “
“In general, we see the results with optimism,” summarizes the Brazilian researcher. “People are able to change their perceptions of a phenomenon, and journalists and electoral system have a relevant role when informing the public.”
