arXiv Computation and Language By Tong Guo, Teng Ye, Yutong Xie, Qiaozhu Mei

A misinformation playbook sharpens judgement without breeding cynicism

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The paper presents a defence against misinformation that focuses on the recurring persuasion strategies—social influence, information manipulation, emotional appeals, fear, conspiracy, and fabrication—rather than on fact-checking individual claims. By training people and language models on a large playbook derived from 214,646 fact-checked claims in 51 languages, the authors show that this approach can improve judgement of unfamiliar claims without increasing cynicism toward true claims. The study includes a pre-registered experiment where briefing participants with the playbook enhanced their discernment of unfamiliar claims while leaving belief in true claims unchanged, though the overall gain was not statistically significant.

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