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Bad News: Testing Gamified Inoculation Against Misinformation

Dickinson, R., Makowski, D., Van Marwijk, H., & Ford, E.

2025 · Preprint

266 participants either played Bad News, a fifteen-minute game that teaches the tactics of misinformation from the inside, or played Tetris. The game group improved significantly more at spotting misinformation afterwards, and political ideology was linked to how vulnerable people were to begin with.

Abstract

Misinformation is increasingly recognised as a global threat, exacerbated by the dominance of social media as a primary news source. Yet much remains to be understood about both effective interventions against it and the role of political ideology. In this study, 266 final participants completed pre-tests assessing their ability to identify misinformative content. The experiment group then played the Bad News Game for 15 minutes, learning about the tactics and methods used within misinformation, whereas the control group played Tetris. All participants then completed post-tests using new items. Our results suggest the Bad News Game is an effective intervention: the experiment group improved significantly more than the control group. We also report significant links between political ideology and vulnerability to misinformation.

Keywords: Misinformation · Reality Beliefs

Cite

Dickinson, R., Makowski, D., Van Marwijk, H., & Ford, E. (2025). Bad News: Testing Gamified Inoculation Against Misinformation. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7xgbt_v1

See also

Exploring the Role of News Outlets in the Rise of a Conspiracy Theory: Hydroxychloroquine in the Early Days of COVID-19 — Dickinson, R., Makowski, D., van Marwijk, H., & Ford, E. (2024)
Introducing the Choice-Confidence (CHOCO) Model for Bimodal Data from Subjective Ratings: Application to the Effect of Attractiveness on Reality Beliefs about AI-Generated Faces — Makowski, D., Neves, A., & Field, A. P. (2025)
Interventions for combating COVID-19 misinformation: a systematic realist review — Dickinson, R., Makowski, D., van Marwijk, H., & Ford, E. (2025)

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The Reality Bending Lab, led by Dominique Makowski at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, conducts world-leading research on reality perception, illusions, fake news, AI-beliefs, deception and its links with emotions, cognitive control and the Self. Using recording signals from the body (ECG, EDA…) and the brain (EEG), we analyse data using advanced modelling (Bayesian statistics, chaos theory, computational models) and develop open-source tools to improve neuropsychological science.

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