Effective Yet Ephemeral Propaganda Defense: There Needs to Be More than One-Shot Inoculation to Enhance Critical Thinking
This addresses the challenge of enhancing long-term resilience against propaganda for news readers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories without achieving sustained results.
The study tackled the problem of propaganda's impact on critical thinking by testing a detection tool based on inoculation theory, finding that while it increased critical thinking during use, the effect vanished without the tool, indicating no lasting impact.
In today's media landscape, propaganda distribution has a significant impact on society. It sows confusion, undermines democratic processes, and leads to increasingly difficult decision-making for news readers. We investigate the lasting effect on critical thinking and propaganda awareness on them when using a propaganda detection and contextualization tool. Building on inoculation theory, which suggests that preemptively exposing individuals to weakened forms of propaganda can improve their resilience against it, we integrate Kahneman's dual-system theory to measure the tools' impact on critical thinking. Through a two-phase online experiment, we measure the effect of several inoculation doses. Our findings show that while the tool increases critical thinking during its use, this increase vanishes without access to the tool. This indicates a single use of the tool does not create a lasting impact. We discuss the implications and propose possible approaches to improve the resilience against propaganda in the long-term.