The #Webimmunization research project has successfully arrived halfway through its lifetime and the consortium partners have met in Oslo (Norway) in the first week of July to discuss the project’s achievements, establish a research agenda for the next months, plan publishing and popularization activities as well as discuss the results of experiments and research carried out by each research group.

Here we published a short video on the meeting in Oslo: 

In that framework, on 6 July 2022 at 10:00 am Norwegian time the project team has organized an open midterm seminar. The guest speaker was Dr Jon Roozenbeek. Dr Roozenbeek is the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. His research focuses on misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, online extremism and inoculation theory. As part of his research, he co-developed the award-winning fake news games Bad News, Harmony Square and Go Viral. During the seminar, he will speak on how to counter misinformation using psychology.

The seminar took place online via Teams platform and was held in English. The organizer and host of the seminar was the Norwegian partner of the #Webimmunization research project – a research group led by Prof. Jonas Kunst (University of Oslo, Department of Psychology).

Recording of the seminar:

Seminar abstract:

Misinformation continues to have adverse consequences for society. In this talk, Dr Jon Roozenbeek discusses what factors make people susceptible to believing misinformation, and how to reduce such susceptibility at scale. The talk focuses especially on psychological inoculations, or “vaccines” against misinformation. Dr Roozenbeek will discuss how people can be “inoculated” not only against specific examples of false and misleading content found online, but also the manipulation techniques and rhetorical tropes that often underlie misinformation, such as emotional manipulation, logical fallacies, and conspiratorial reasoning. The talk will explore how online games such as Bad News and Harmony Square and short videos can improve people’s ability to recognise manipulative content, and the experimental evidence behind these interventions (in the lab as well as in real-world environments).

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