Creating misinformation in the classroom: Active inoculation against health misinformation with undergraduate students.

Bradley Crocker, Emily V. Pike, Lindsay R Duncan

Online health information plays a prominent role in shaping the public’s attitudes and beliefs towards health-related topics. Although the internet stands to benefit public health by providing accessible up-to-date health information, this platform is often clouded with misleading, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated information. Internet users must exhibit high eHealth literacy to distinguish high-quality sources of health information from websites with deceptive marketing claims often used by commercial fitness and supplement advertisers; a skill that may be bolstered by strategic exposure to health misinformation (i.e., inoculation messages). The purpose of this study was to determine if a classroom-based inoculation message can improve undergraduate students’ ability to discern health information quality. We conducted a quasi-experimental one group pretest-posttest study to assess the learning outcomes of a classroom-based intervention involving passive and active forms of inoculation messaging related to online health misinformation. We assessed perceived eHealth literacy, performed eHealth literacy, and bullshit receptivity using a battery of validated questionnaires in a population of 51 undergraduate kinesiology students pre- and post-intervention. Dependent t-Tests indicate small but significant improvements in perceived eHealth literacy [t (48) = -2.413, p = .02] and performed eHealth literacy [t (45) = -2.217, p = .03]. Findings from this study support the use of inoculation messages in classrooms to improve students’ abilities to assess the quality of online health information sources. This study adds to a growing body of literature indicating that contextualized exposure to weakened forms of misinformation can effectively promote resistance against deception.