Prebunking via Induction: Categorization Practice Reduces Misinformation Susceptibility

Effective misinformation resistance requires practice, yet it has been unclear what this practice should ideally entail. In the current study, we compare a category induction strategy (practicing categorizing social media posts according to features of misinformation) with an active control reflecting standard educational practice (instruction about features of misinformation followed by formative assessments) in two 9th-grade honors civics classes. Students completed weekly learning activities as part of their routine classwork, and we used a shared educational research infrastructure (Terracotta) to randomly assign students to category induction or active control versions of these activities. Students assigned to inductive practice demonstrated advantages in identifying features of misinformation, with no deficit in conceptual knowledge about the manipulation techniques. And importantly, students assigned to inductive practice showed significantly better discrimination between real and fake news headlines on a novel transfer task using a completely different stimulus and task format. Furthermore, students in the category induction condition were less willing to share manipulative content and were more willing to share credible content, without becoming generally skeptical of online information. These results demonstrate the utility of category induction as an educational strategy, and reinforce the importance of authentic practice activities for developing effective misinformation resistance.