Inoculation and accuracy prompting increase accuracy discernment in combination but not alone

Misinformation remains a serious problem and continues to be a major focus of intervention efforts. Psychological inoculation - a popular intervention approach wherein people are taught to identify manipulation techniques - is being adopted at scale around the globe by technology companies in an effort to combat misinformation. Yet the efficacy of this approach for increasing belief accuracy remains unclear, as prior work has largely focused on technique identification - rather than accuracy judgments - using synthetic materials that do not contain claims of truth or falsity. To address this issue, we conducted 5 studies with 7,286 online participants using a set of news headlines based on real-world false and true content in which we systematically varied the presence or absence of emotional manipulation. Although an emotional manipulation inoculation video did help participants identify emotional manipulation (replicating past work), there was no carry-over effect to improving participants’ ability to tell truth from falsehood (i.e. no effect on truth discernment). Encouragingly, however, when the emotional inoculation was paired with an accuracy prompt - i.e., an intervention intended to draw people’s attention to the concept of accuracy when they are receiving the inoculation intervention - the combined intervention did successfully improve truth discernment by increasing belief in true content. These results generate new insights regarding inoculation, and provide evidence for a key synergy between two popular psychological interventions against misinformation.