Combating Social Contagion: The Power of Pre-Bunking and Resistance Skills Training

Strategic Insights -

Social media has made it easier for false information to spread like wildfire, with potentially devastating consequences. In the wake of a recent incident in Malaysia where nearly 40 girls reported seeing a "face of pure evil," experts are exploring the phenomenon of mass psychogenic illness, which shares similarities with the spread of misinformation. Social connections can facilitate the spread of germs, mental illness, and even behaviors, and researchers are working to understand how to combat this spread. One approach is pre-bunking, which involves training people to recognize and resist misinformation before it takes hold.

Key Takeaways:

  • Misinformation and disinformation can spread faster and farther than truth online, making it challenging to debunk before people have already lost the race.
  • People spread false information for various reasons, including advancing their personal agenda or narrative, which can lead to echo chambers that filter out accurate information.
  • Even when people do not intend to spread false information online, doing so tends to happen due to a lack of attention paid to accuracy or lower levels of digital media literacy.
  • Pre-bunking, a concept first used in the 1960s, involves training people to practice skills to spot and resist misinformation and disinformation on a smaller scale before they're exposed to the real thing.
  • This approach is akin to vaccines that build immunity through exposure to a weakened form of the disease-causing germ.
  • By role-playing and practicing counterarguments, pre-bunking provides a sort of psychological inoculation against misinformation and disinformation, at least temporarily.
  • The goal of pre-bunking is to provide a "booster shot" of training, which can be repeated with larger doses of false information and further counterarguments.
  • Simply put, if multiple members of your social network have strong resistance skills, then your group has a better chance of resisting the incursion of harmful norms and behaviors into your network than if it's just you resisting alone.

Statistics:

  • In 2019, a rare and shocking event in the Malaysian peninsula town of Ketereh grabbed international headlines, where nearly 40 girls age 12 to 18 from a religious school had been screaming inconsolably, claiming to have seen a "face of pure evil."
  • Research shows that misinformation and disinformation spread faster and farther than truth online, with potentially devastating consequences.
  • Many researchers like the author of this text don't yet know the best way to keep the effects of pre-bunking "booster shots" going in people's lives.

Sources:

  • A Practical Guide to Pre-Bunking Misinformation, created by a collaborative team from the University of Cambridge, BBC Media Action and Jigsaw, an interdisciplinary think tank within Google.
  • A study on the delay of the initiation of tobacco use among adolescents using pre-bunking.