Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Sebastián Mesch Henriques | email: manuelserodio.arg@gmail.com
Manuel Serodio 1°, Sebastián Mesch Henriques 1°, Martina Boscolo 2°, Pedro Bekinschtein 1°
1° Laboratorio de Memoria y Cognición Molecular, Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva y Traslacional, CONICET-Fundación INECO-Universidad Favaloro.
2° Laboratorio de Neurociencia, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Fake news and misinformation have been recognized as strategic political communication tools that may pose a threat to many democracies. Bad News is a game designed as a playful media literacy tool meant to teach players to detect online misinformation by practicing six common fake news techniques. This idea of developing cognitive and behavioral immunity through exposure to weakened examples of misleading information to then challenge the person is known as psychological inoculation. Various studies point at this strategy as an efficient and effective way to protect people against fake news. In order to test the cross-cultural validity of this intervention, we developed a Spanish translation of the Bad News game (specifically into the Rio de la Plata vernacular) with a cultural adaptation and enrichment of the stimuli to have better ecological validity. Then, we tested and selected said stimuli according to the qualification of a group of professional fact-checkers as expert judges. Lastly, we present some preliminary results of our first intervention using a 2 (treatment vs. control) × 2 (pre vs. post) mixed design (N = 67), with future plans of enlarging sample size to increase the statistical power.