Pre-exposing people to weakened persuasive attacks cultivates mental resistance against later misinformation.

Evidence

McGuire reasoned that some of the captured soldiers didn’t have any pre-existing mental defences to resist persuasion attempts. After all, who would expect an attack on basic capitalist ideals? It’s what he called a ‘cultural truism’ – a societal belief so widely held that nobody seems to question it. Rather than giving people more reasons to support a desired attitude, what we should be focusing on, McGuire argued, was exposing people to weakened doses of the persuasive attack. The analogy to how our bodies become immune to viruses quickly became apparent to McGuire. … In fact, the process of psychological inoculation follows the biomedical analogy exactly: just as exposing people to a severely weakened (or dead) strain of a virus triggers the production of antibodies to help the body fight off future infection, the same can be achieved with information. By pre-emptively exposing people to a sufficiently weakened dose of a persuasive ‘challenge’ – and by subsequently refuting that challenge – mental antibodies can be cultivated to help generate psychological resistance against misinformation. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 633

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘cultural truism’ and the psychological inoculation analogy at the core of the whole book.
• XREF: connects to: Inoculation can work therapeutically after exposure, not only preventively. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 651; Psychological inoculation decays without periodic recall-based boosters — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 813; McGuire’s ‘no prior exposure’ requirement crippled inoculation research for decades. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 648 (+9 more)