Who are Effective and Trustworthy Messengers for Election-Related Communications? How Local Messengers Impact Effectiveness of Psychological Inoculation

Trust serves as a critical heuristic that facilitates basic democratic functioning. The rise of election-related misinformation has been linked to a decline in democratic trust. Recent research suggests that psychological inoculation, or pre-exposure to how misinformation works, may be an effective method to address misinformation beliefs. We extend this line of inquiry to examine the effectiveness of inoculation messages in countering election-related misinformation and to explore whether inoculation interventions are subject to messenger effects, a phenomenon in which information is evaluated by the identity of the person delivering it, rather than its objective content. Using three online experiments (n = 2317), we test how different messengers (e.g., election organizations, election officials, and non-election-related individuals and entities) impact participants’ discernment, trust, and engagement with actual true and false headlines. We find that messenger identity affects the effectiveness of inoculation messages. Specifically, local, male messengers—such as pastors and election officials—were more effective than a typical voter and other institution-based messengers at improving discernment between true and false information by up to 12 percentage points. These messenger effects were strongest in the period leading up to the 2022 US midterm elections and for individuals more susceptible to believing misinformation.