Study: real facts can beat 'alternative facts' if boosted by inoculation | Dana Nuccitelli
by Dana Nuccitelli from on (#2A1JK)
In our current "post-truth" climate, inoculation may provide the key to making facts matter again
It's fitting that as Donald Trump continues to flirt with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, inoculation may provide the key to effectively debunking this sort of misinformation.
That's the finding of a new study published in Global Challenges by Sander van der Linden, Anthony Leiserowitz, Seth Rosenthal, and Edward Maibach. The paper tested what's known as "inoculation theory," explained in the video below by John Cook, who's also published research on the subject. The video is a lecture from the Denial101x free online course, which itself is structured based on inoculation theory: