Effective Yet Ephemeral Propaganda Defense: There Needs to Be More than One-Shot Inoculation to Enhance Critical Thinking

Nicolas Hoferer; Kilian Sprenkamp; Dorian Christoph Quelle; Daniel Gordon Jones; Zoya Katashinskaya; Alexandre Bovet; Liudmila Zavolokina

arXiv · 2503.16497

Effective Yet Ephemeral Propaganda Defense: There Needs to Be More than One-Shot Inoculation to Enhance Critical Thinking

Nicolas Hoferer·Kilian Sprenkamp·Dorian Christoph Quelle·Daniel Gordon Jones·Zoya Katashinskaya·Alexandre Bovet·Liudmila Zavolokina

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Abstract

In today's media landscape, propaganda distribution has a significant impact on society. It sows confusion, undermines democratic processes, and leads to increasingly difficult decision-making for news readers. We investigate the lasting effect on critical thinking and propaganda awareness on them when using a propaganda detection and contextualization tool. Building on inoculation theory, which suggests that preemptively exposing individuals to weakened forms of propaganda can improve their resilience against it, we integrate Kahneman's dual-system theory to measure the tools' impact on critical thinking. Through a two-phase online experiment, we measure the effect of several inoculation doses. Our findings show that while the tool increases critical thinking during its use, this increase vanishes without access to the tool. This indicates a single use of the tool does not create a lasting impact. We discuss the implications and propose possible approaches to improve the resilience against propaganda in the long-term.

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Nicolas Hoferer, Kilian Sprenkamp, Dorian Christoph Quelle, Daniel Gordon Jones, Zoya Katashinskaya, Alexandre Bovet, Liudmila Zavolokina. 2025-03-11. Effective Yet Ephemeral Propaganda Defense: There Needs to Be More than One-Shot Inoculation to Enhance Critical Thinking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16497

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