Conversational Inoculation to Enhance Resistance to Misinformation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Conversational Inoculation, a novel chatbot-based method to strengthen individuals' resistance to misinformation through dynamic, interactive conversations, validated by user experiments showing its effectiveness.

Contribution

It presents the first implementation and evaluation of Conversational Inoculation, demonstrating its potential as a scalable approach to combat misinformation.

Findings

Conversational Inoculation enhances resistance to misinformation.

Trust and independence in conversations boost effectiveness.

Interaction friction can hinder the inoculation process.

Abstract

Proliferation of misinformation is a globally acknowledged problem. Cognitive Inoculation helps build resistance to different forms of persuasion, such as misinformation. We investigate Conversational Inoculation, a method to help people build resistance to misinformation through dynamic conversations with a chatbot. We built a Web-based system to implement the method, and conducted a within-subject user experiment to compare it with two traditional inoculation methods. Our results validate Conversational Inoculation as a viable novel method, and show how it was able to enhance participants' resistance to misinformation. A qualitative analysis of the conversations between participants and the chatbot reveal independence and trust as factors that boosted the efficiency of Conversational Inoculation, and friction of interaction as a factor hindering it. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of using Conversational Inoculation to combat misinformation. Our work contributes a timely investigation and a promising research direction in scalable ways to combat misinformation.