2026/01/29 by Daniel William Szabo, Chi-Lan Yang, Aku Visuri +4 · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Educational Strategies and Epistemologies #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Psychological and Educational Research Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3772318.379095
openalex publication_date 2026/01/29 · openalex created_date 2026/02/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Proliferation of misinformation is a globally acknowledged problem. Cognitive Inoculation helps build resistance to different forms of persuasion, such as misinformation. We investigate Conversational Inoculation, a method to help people build resistance to misinformation through dynamic conversations with a chatbot. We built a Web-based system to implement the method, and conducted a within-subject user experiment to compare it with two traditional inoculation methods. Our results validate Conversational Inoculation as a viable novel method, and show how it was able to enhance participants' resistance to misinformation. A qualitative analysis of the conversations between participants and the chatbot reveal independence and trust as factors that boosted the efficiency of Conversational Inoculation, and friction of interaction as a factor hindering it. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of using Conversational Inoculation to combat misinformation. Our work contributes a timely investigation and a promising research direction in scalable ways to combat misinformation.