Jon Roozenbeek
Biographic Data
| ID | 382926 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jon Roozenbeek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jon |
| FAMILY NAME | Roozenbeek |
| SIGNATURE | ROOZENBEEK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8150-9305 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Misinformation is both a symptom and a cause
In their commentary, Altay and Mercier (2026) frame misinformation as a mere symptom of deeper underlying societal problems. Here, we highlight a more nuanced causal account involving reciprocal effects, where misinformation can act as a cause of societal issues, which in turn can simultaneously act as a cause of misinformation belief. When it comes to the total causal impact of misinformation, we note the importance of taking into account not on…
Bad News in the civics classroom
Although the serious game Bad News has been used to inoculate citizens against misinformation, it has not been formally evaluated in traditional classrooms. We therefore evaluated its impact on 516 upper-secondary Swedish students playing individually, paired, or with the whole class. Results show that students improved their ability to discern manipulation techniques in social media posts. Students with prior positive attitudes to credible news …
Using psychological science to understand and fight health misinformation
There is widespread concern that misinformation poses dangerous risks to health, well-being, and civic life. Despite a growing body of research on the topic, significant questions remain about the psychological factors that render people susceptible to misinformation, the extent to which it affects real-world behavior, how it spreads online and offline, and intervention strategies that counter and correct misinformation effectively. This report r…
Norm-enhanced prebunking for actively open-minded thinking indirectly improves misinformation discernment and reduces conspiracy beliefs
Tune in to the prebunking network! Development and validation of six inoculation videos that prebunk manipulation tactics and logical fallacies in misinformation
Meta‐analyses have demonstrated how inoculation interventions increase the detection of misinformation, but their scalability has remained elusive. To address this, Study 1 (pre‐registered; N = 1,583) tested the efficacy of three short inoculation videos (prebunks) against three common manipulation tactics used in misinformation: (1) polarization, (2) conspiracy theories, and (3) fake experts. Results indicated that all three inoculation videos (…
Liars know they are lying
Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some scholars have questioned the utility of misinformation research altogether, arguing that misinforma…
The Psychology of Misinformation
King Charles III is Dracula's distant cousin. Governments are hiding information about UFOs. COVID-19 came from outer space. These sound like absurd statements, but some are true, and others are misinformation. But what exactly is misinformation? Who believes and spreads things that aren't true, and why? What solutions do we have available, and how well do they work? This book answers all these questions and more. Tackling the science of misinfor…
Why misinformation must not be ignored
Recent academic debate has seen the emergence of the claim that misinformation is not a significant societal problem. We argue that the arguments used to support this minimizing position are flawed, particularly if interpreted (e.g., by policymakers or the public) as suggesting that misinformation can be safely ignored. Here, we rebut the two main claims, namely that misinformation is not of substantive concern (a) due to its low incidence and (b…
Predicting the replicability of social and behavioural science claims in Covid-19 preprints
Replications are important for assessing the reliability of published findings. However, they are costly, and it is infeasible to replicate everything. Accurate, fast, lower-cost alternatives such as eliciting predictions could accelerate assessment for rapid policy implementation in a crisis and help guide a more efficient allocation of scarce replication resources. We elicited judgements from participants on 100 claims from preprints about an e…
The perceived feasibility of behavior change is positively associated with support for domain-matched climate policies
Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information
The extent to which belief in (mis)information reflects lack of knowledge versus a lack of motivation to be accurate is unclear. Here, across four experiments (n = 3,364), we motivated US participants to be accurate by providing financial incentives for correct responses about the veracity of true and false political news headlines. Financial incentives improved accuracy and reduced partisan bias in judgements of headlines by about 30%, primarily…
Psychological Inoculation against Misinformation
Much like a viral contagion, misinformation can spread rapidly from one individual to another. Inoculation theory offers a logical basis for developing a psychological "vaccine" against misinformation. We discuss the origins of inoculation theory, starting with its roots in the 1960s as a "vaccine for brainwash," and detail the major theoretical and practical innovations that inoculation research has witnessed over the years. Specifically, we rev…
Long-term effectiveness of inoculation against misinformation
170), participants played either Bad News (inoculation group) or Tetris (gamified control group) and rated the reliability of news headlines that either used a misinformation technique or not. We found that participants rate fake news as significantly less reliable after the intervention. In Experiment 1, we assessed participants at regular intervals to explore the longevity of this effect and found that the inoculation effect remains stable for …
Visual Mis- and Disinformation, Social Media, and Democracy
Disentangling Item and Testing Effects in Inoculation Research on Online Misinformation
Online misinformation is a pervasive global problem. In response, psychologists have recently explored the theory of psychological inoculation: If people are preemptively exposed to a weakened version of a misinformation technique, they can build up cognitive resistance. This study addresses two unanswered methodological questions about a widely adopted online “fake news” inoculation game, Bad News. First, research in this area has often looked a…
Active inoculation boosts attitudinal resistance against extremist persuasion techniques
The Internet is gaining relevance as a platform where extremist organizations seek to recruit new members. For this preregistered study, we developed and tested a novel online game, Radicalise , which aims to combat the effectiveness of online recruitment strategies used by extremist organizations, based on the principles of active psychological inoculation. The game “inoculates” players by exposing them to severely weakened doses of the key tech…
The language of conspiracy
This paper analyzes key psychological themes in language used by prominent conspiracy theorists and science advocates on Twitter, as well as those of a random sample of their follower base. We conducted a variety of psycholinguistic analyses over a corpus of 16,290 influencer tweets and 160,949 follower tweets in order to evaluate stable intergroup differences in language use among those who subscribe or are exposed to conspiratorial content and …
Climate change threats increase modern racism as a function of social dominance orientation and ingroup identification
Towards psychological herd immunity
Misinformation about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a pressing societal challenge. Across two studies, one preregistered ( n1 = 1771 and n2 = 1777), we assess the efficacy of two 'prebunking' interventions aimed at improving people's ability to spot manipulation techniques commonly used in COVID-19 misinformation across three different languages (English, French and German). We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, (a) incre…
Inoculating Against Fake News About Covid-19
The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. In this article, we explore the coronavirus “infodemic” and how behavioral scientists may seek to address this problem. We detail the scope of the problem and discuss the negative influence that COVID-19 misinformation can have on the widespread adoption of health prote…
You are fake news
Although the rise of fake news is posing an increasing threat to societies worldwide, little is known about what associations the term ‘fake news’ activates in the public mind. Here, we report a psychological bias that we describe as the ‘fake news effect’: the tendency for partisans to use the term ‘fake news’ to discount and discredit ideologically uncongenial media sources. In a national sample of the US population ( N = 1000), we elicited top…
Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation
The spread of online misinformation poses serious challenges to societies worldwide. In a novel attempt to address this issue, we designed a psychological intervention in the form of an online browser game. In the game, players take on the role of a fake news producer and learn to master six documented techniques commonly used in the production of misinformation: polarisation, invoking emotions, spreading conspiracy theories, trolling people onli…
The fake news game
The rapid spread of online misinformation poses an increasing risk to societies worldwide. To help counter this, we developed a ‘fake news game’ in which participants are actively tasked with creating a news article about a strongly politicized issue (the European refugee crisis) using misleading tactics, from the perspective of different types of fake news producers. To pilot test the efficacy of the game, we conducted a randomized field study (…
The fake news game
The rapid spread of online misinformation poses an increasing risk to societies worldwide. To help counter this, we developed a ‘fake news game’ in which participants are actively tasked with creating a news article about a strongly politicized issue (the European refugee crisis) using misleading tactics, from the perspective of different types of fake news producers. To pilot test the efficacy of the game, we conducted a randomized field study (…
You are fake news
Although the rise of fake news is posing an increasing threat to societies worldwide, little is known about what associations the term ‘fake news’ activates in the public mind. Here, we report a psychological bias that we describe as the ‘fake news effect’: the tendency for partisans to use the term ‘fake news’ to discount and discredit ideologically uncongenial media sources. In a national sample of the US population ( N = 1000), we elicited top…
Towards psychological herd immunity
Misinformation about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a pressing societal challenge. Across two studies, one preregistered ( n1 = 1771 and n2 = 1777), we assess the efficacy of two 'prebunking' interventions aimed at improving people's ability to spot manipulation techniques commonly used in COVID-19 misinformation across three different languages (English, French and German). We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, (a) incre…
The language of conspiracy
This paper analyzes key psychological themes in language used by prominent conspiracy theorists and science advocates on Twitter, as well as those of a random sample of their follower base. We conducted a variety of psycholinguistic analyses over a corpus of 16,290 influencer tweets and 160,949 follower tweets in order to evaluate stable intergroup differences in language use among those who subscribe or are exposed to conspiratorial content and …
Psychological Inoculation against Misinformation
Much like a viral contagion, misinformation can spread rapidly from one individual to another. Inoculation theory offers a logical basis for developing a psychological "vaccine" against misinformation. We discuss the origins of inoculation theory, starting with its roots in the 1960s as a "vaccine for brainwash," and detail the major theoretical and practical innovations that inoculation research has witnessed over the years. Specifically, we rev…
Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information
The extent to which belief in (mis)information reflects lack of knowledge versus a lack of motivation to be accurate is unclear. Here, across four experiments (n = 3,364), we motivated US participants to be accurate by providing financial incentives for correct responses about the veracity of true and false political news headlines. Financial incentives improved accuracy and reduced partisan bias in judgements of headlines by about 30%, primarily…
Why misinformation must not be ignored
Recent academic debate has seen the emergence of the claim that misinformation is not a significant societal problem. We argue that the arguments used to support this minimizing position are flawed, particularly if interpreted (e.g., by policymakers or the public) as suggesting that misinformation can be safely ignored. Here, we rebut the two main claims, namely that misinformation is not of substantive concern (a) due to its low incidence and (b…
Climate change threats increase modern racism as a function of social dominance orientation and ingroup identification
Active inoculation boosts attitudinal resistance against extremist persuasion techniques
The Internet is gaining relevance as a platform where extremist organizations seek to recruit new members. For this preregistered study, we developed and tested a novel online game, Radicalise , which aims to combat the effectiveness of online recruitment strategies used by extremist organizations, based on the principles of active psychological inoculation. The game “inoculates” players by exposing them to severely weakened doses of the key tech…
Tune in to the prebunking network! Development and validation of six inoculation videos that prebunk manipulation tactics and logical fallacies in misinformation
Meta‐analyses have demonstrated how inoculation interventions increase the detection of misinformation, but their scalability has remained elusive. To address this, Study 1 (pre‐registered; N = 1,583) tested the efficacy of three short inoculation videos (prebunks) against three common manipulation tactics used in misinformation: (1) polarization, (2) conspiracy theories, and (3) fake experts. Results indicated that all three inoculation videos (…
The fake news game
The rapid spread of online misinformation poses an increasing risk to societies worldwide. To help counter this, we developed a ‘fake news game’ in which participants are actively tasked with creating a news article about a strongly politicized issue (the European refugee crisis) using misleading tactics, from the perspective of different types of fake news producers. To pilot test the efficacy of the game, we conducted a randomized field study (…
Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation
The spread of online misinformation poses serious challenges to societies worldwide. In a novel attempt to address this issue, we designed a psychological intervention in the form of an online browser game. In the game, players take on the role of a fake news producer and learn to master six documented techniques commonly used in the production of misinformation: polarisation, invoking emotions, spreading conspiracy theories, trolling people onli…
Inoculating Against Fake News About Covid-19
The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. In this article, we explore the coronavirus “infodemic” and how behavioral scientists may seek to address this problem. We detail the scope of the problem and discuss the negative influence that COVID-19 misinformation can have on the widespread adoption of health prote…
You are fake news
Although the rise of fake news is posing an increasing threat to societies worldwide, little is known about what associations the term ‘fake news’ activates in the public mind. Here, we report a psychological bias that we describe as the ‘fake news effect’: the tendency for partisans to use the term ‘fake news’ to discount and discredit ideologically uncongenial media sources. In a national sample of the US population ( N = 1000), we elicited top…
Long-term effectiveness of inoculation against misinformation
170), participants played either Bad News (inoculation group) or Tetris (gamified control group) and rated the reliability of news headlines that either used a misinformation technique or not. We found that participants rate fake news as significantly less reliable after the intervention. In Experiment 1, we assessed participants at regular intervals to explore the longevity of this effect and found that the inoculation effect remains stable for …
Visual Mis- and Disinformation, Social Media, and Democracy
Disentangling Item and Testing Effects in Inoculation Research on Online Misinformation
Online misinformation is a pervasive global problem. In response, psychologists have recently explored the theory of psychological inoculation: If people are preemptively exposed to a weakened version of a misinformation technique, they can build up cognitive resistance. This study addresses two unanswered methodological questions about a widely adopted online “fake news” inoculation game, Bad News. First, research in this area has often looked a…
Active inoculation boosts attitudinal resistance against extremist persuasion techniques
The Internet is gaining relevance as a platform where extremist organizations seek to recruit new members. For this preregistered study, we developed and tested a novel online game, Radicalise , which aims to combat the effectiveness of online recruitment strategies used by extremist organizations, based on the principles of active psychological inoculation. The game “inoculates” players by exposing them to severely weakened doses of the key tech…
The language of conspiracy
This paper analyzes key psychological themes in language used by prominent conspiracy theorists and science advocates on Twitter, as well as those of a random sample of their follower base. We conducted a variety of psycholinguistic analyses over a corpus of 16,290 influencer tweets and 160,949 follower tweets in order to evaluate stable intergroup differences in language use among those who subscribe or are exposed to conspiratorial content and …
Climate change threats increase modern racism as a function of social dominance orientation and ingroup identification
Towards psychological herd immunity
Misinformation about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a pressing societal challenge. Across two studies, one preregistered ( n1 = 1771 and n2 = 1777), we assess the efficacy of two 'prebunking' interventions aimed at improving people's ability to spot manipulation techniques commonly used in COVID-19 misinformation across three different languages (English, French and German). We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, (a) incre…
Psychological Inoculation against Misinformation
Much like a viral contagion, misinformation can spread rapidly from one individual to another. Inoculation theory offers a logical basis for developing a psychological "vaccine" against misinformation. We discuss the origins of inoculation theory, starting with its roots in the 1960s as a "vaccine for brainwash," and detail the major theoretical and practical innovations that inoculation research has witnessed over the years. Specifically, we rev…
The perceived feasibility of behavior change is positively associated with support for domain-matched climate policies
Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information
The extent to which belief in (mis)information reflects lack of knowledge versus a lack of motivation to be accurate is unclear. Here, across four experiments (n = 3,364), we motivated US participants to be accurate by providing financial incentives for correct responses about the veracity of true and false political news headlines. Financial incentives improved accuracy and reduced partisan bias in judgements of headlines by about 30%, primarily…
Liars know they are lying
Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some scholars have questioned the utility of misinformation research altogether, arguing that misinforma…
The Psychology of Misinformation
King Charles III is Dracula's distant cousin. Governments are hiding information about UFOs. COVID-19 came from outer space. These sound like absurd statements, but some are true, and others are misinformation. But what exactly is misinformation? Who believes and spreads things that aren't true, and why? What solutions do we have available, and how well do they work? This book answers all these questions and more. Tackling the science of misinfor…
Why misinformation must not be ignored
Recent academic debate has seen the emergence of the claim that misinformation is not a significant societal problem. We argue that the arguments used to support this minimizing position are flawed, particularly if interpreted (e.g., by policymakers or the public) as suggesting that misinformation can be safely ignored. Here, we rebut the two main claims, namely that misinformation is not of substantive concern (a) due to its low incidence and (b…
Predicting the replicability of social and behavioural science claims in Covid-19 preprints
Replications are important for assessing the reliability of published findings. However, they are costly, and it is infeasible to replicate everything. Accurate, fast, lower-cost alternatives such as eliciting predictions could accelerate assessment for rapid policy implementation in a crisis and help guide a more efficient allocation of scarce replication resources. We elicited judgements from participants on 100 claims from preprints about an e…
Bad News in the civics classroom
Although the serious game Bad News has been used to inoculate citizens against misinformation, it has not been formally evaluated in traditional classrooms. We therefore evaluated its impact on 516 upper-secondary Swedish students playing individually, paired, or with the whole class. Results show that students improved their ability to discern manipulation techniques in social media posts. Students with prior positive attitudes to credible news …
Using psychological science to understand and fight health misinformation
There is widespread concern that misinformation poses dangerous risks to health, well-being, and civic life. Despite a growing body of research on the topic, significant questions remain about the psychological factors that render people susceptible to misinformation, the extent to which it affects real-world behavior, how it spreads online and offline, and intervention strategies that counter and correct misinformation effectively. This report r…
Norm-enhanced prebunking for actively open-minded thinking indirectly improves misinformation discernment and reduces conspiracy beliefs
Tune in to the prebunking network! Development and validation of six inoculation videos that prebunk manipulation tactics and logical fallacies in misinformation
Meta‐analyses have demonstrated how inoculation interventions increase the detection of misinformation, but their scalability has remained elusive. To address this, Study 1 (pre‐registered; N = 1,583) tested the efficacy of three short inoculation videos (prebunks) against three common manipulation tactics used in misinformation: (1) polarization, (2) conspiracy theories, and (3) fake experts. Results indicated that all three inoculation videos (…
Misinformation is both a symptom and a cause
In their commentary, Altay and Mercier (2026) frame misinformation as a mere symptom of deeper underlying societal problems. Here, we highlight a more nuanced causal account involving reciprocal effects, where misinformation can act as a cause of societal issues, which in turn can simultaneously act as a cause of misinformation belief. When it comes to the total causal impact of misinformation, we note the importance of taking into account not on…
Misinformation and Its Impacts (21 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Misinformation (14 works) · Political science (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Internet privacy (7 works) · Computer security (6 works) · Media Influence and Health (6 works)