McGuire’s ‘no prior exposure’ requirement crippled inoculation research for decades.

Evidence

There was one thing in particular that didn’t add up for him. At the time, he worried about the evidence for selective exposure. If it’s true that people selectively attend to evidence – in the extreme sense – then they would never encounter or engage with content that might challenge their beliefs. This means that inoculation would be applicable across the board, because people would have never been challenged on any of their attitudes and thus lack the necessary mental defences in the event of an attack. But McGuire didn’t buy into the theory of selective exposure, at least not in the strong form, as he often witnessed people exposing themselves to ideas that challenged their beliefs. So he reasoned that inoculation must be restricted to the subset of beliefs on which people have never been challenged. For what does it mean to inoculate someone who has already been exposed to the ‘virus’? — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 648

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the selective-exposure literature on partisan news consumption from chapter 8 — the algorithm debate. — connects to: Pre-exposing people to weakened persuasive attacks cultivates mental resistance against later misinformation. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 633