Fake news game confers

psychological resistance against

online misinformation
Jon Roozenbeek & Sander van der Linden
Critiqued by: Jiema Alyanna Danielle S. Manaid
• Statement of the problem
• Continued influence effect of misinformation suggests that corrections are
often ineffective  Developing better debunking and fact checking tools is
therefore unlikely to be sufficient

• Objectives
• to prevent false narratives from taking root in memory in the first place,
focusing specifically on the process of preemptive debunking or so-called
“prebunking”.

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THE RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS
“[…] we hypothesise that by exposing the general techniques that
underlie many (political) persuasion attempts, broad-scale attitudinal
resistance can be conferred.”
• Response variable: attitudinal resistance (ability to identify fake news
strategies and fake news)
• Predictor variable: exposure to general techniques that underlie
persuasion attempts
• Possible confounding factors: age, race, gender, geographic location,
socioeconomic status, political orientation

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METHODS FOR DATA GATHERING

Figure 1. The “Bad News Game” intro screen

(www.getbadnews.com)
Scale of measurement: Individual units

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THE STUDY DESIGN
• OBSERVATIONAL

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STUDY UNITS
• STUDY UNITS
• No randomization  no control group
• Relied on convenience sampling
• Inclusion criteria:
• Anyone with internet connection
• Exposed to press release within university and
• News outlets’ (BBC) announcement
• Gave consent

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SAMPLE SIZE
• N = 14,266

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COMPLETENESS OF DATA
• N = 43,687 responses  n = 14,266 completed responses used

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APPROPRIATE DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS
• Bar graphs have low confidence interval  higher precision

• Use of violin plots

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APPROPRIATE STAT METHODS
• One-way repeated measures MANOVA
• Within-subjects design
• differences in multiple dependent variables between treatments
• participants have taken part in all treatments
• Univariate follow-up comparisons with five paired t-tests using a
conservative Bonferroni correction

 Mentioned in results instead of methodology

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