Inoculation theory
The finding, from William McGuire's experiments in the 1960s, that exposing people to a weakened version of an argument against their beliefs, along with a refutation, makes them more resistant to the full argument later. The medical analogy is deliberate, and the theory underlies prebunking.
McGuire began from a puzzle. Beliefs that nobody had ever challenged, such as the value of brushing one's teeth, turned out to be the easiest to overturn with a well-made attack, because the holders had never had to defend them. He reasoned by analogy with vaccination: a small, manageable dose of the attack, followed by a demonstration of how to answer it, should build resistance. In a series of experiments with Demetrios Papageorgis from 1961, it did, and the effect was stronger than simply giving people supporting arguments for their belief.
The theory lay quiet in the persuasion literature for decades and was revived when researchers studying online misinformation needed something more durable than correction. Its modern form is technique-based: rather than inoculating against each false claim, which would require knowing the claims in advance, it inoculates against the methods, which are few and recur. That is prebunking.
Two findings matter for practice. The weakened dose must be weak enough to be refuted and strong enough to be recognizable, and the effect fades without a booster. A reader who learns Cherry Picking once and never meets an example again will lose the resistance; a reader who meets the technique regularly, in a quiz or in the news, keeps it.
Compare prebunking and counter-propaganda.
Sources
- McGuire, William J., and Demetrios Papageorgis. "The Relative Efficacy of Various Types of Prior Belief-Defense in Producing Immunity against Persuasion." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 62, no. 2 (1961): 327–337. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0042026
- McGuire, William J. "Inducing Resistance to Persuasion: Some Contemporary Approaches." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 1 (1964): 191–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60052-0
- Compton, Josh. "Inoculation Theory." In The SAGE Handbook of Persuasion, edited by James Price Dillard and Lijiang Shen, 220–236. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2013.