Conversational Inoculation to Enhance Resistance to Misinformation

2026-01-29

AI Summary

This study addresses the growing challenge of misinformation by proposing and empirically validating a novel paradigm termed “conversational inoculation,” which enhances users’ psychological resistance to false information through dynamic interactions with a chatbot. In contrast to traditional one-way inoculation approaches, this method emphasizes user agency and trust cultivated during interactive dialogue to strengthen intervention efficacy. Leveraging a web-based conversational system, the research integrates human–computer interaction experiments with qualitative dialogue analysis. Findings demonstrate that conversational inoculation significantly improves users’ resilience against misinformation, while also identifying key facilitators of its effectiveness—such as perceived autonomy and rapport—as well as implementation barriers, including interactional friction and mismatches in user expectations.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion

Abstract

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.

Problem

• misinformation
• resistance
• cognitive inoculation
• conversational inoculation
• persuasion

Innovation

• Conversational Inoculation
• Misinformation Resistance
• Chatbot Interaction
• Cognitive Inoculation
• Human-AI Dialogue