Prebunking: preemptively debunking falsehoods about elections can rebuild people’s confidence in election integrity

Prebunking: preemptively debunking falsehoods about elections can rebuild people’s confidence in election integrity

Inoculating people against misinformation by preemptively sharing factual information – a strategy termed “prebunking” – can sucessfully restore confidence in elections, according to a new study analyzing recent national elections in the US and Brazil. Confidence in elections can also increase when political elites go against their own interests and actively debunk election falsehoods. John Carey and colleagues call this latter phenomenon “credible source corrections.”

Both Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and US President Donald Trump leveled false accusations about election fraud after losing their respective bids for reelection in 2020 and 2022, respectively, galvanizing their supporters to attempt democracy-threatening insurrections. These allegations persisted in the US throughout the country’s 2022 midterm elections.

Here, Carey et al. investigate the impact of two strategies to correct mistaken beliefs about elections’ credibility: prebunking and credible source corrections. The first introduces people to brief descriptions of circulating falsehoods and then disproves that misinformation with evidence, essentially vaccinating people against viral conspiracies. The second happens when sources whom already-misinformed people deem credible – typically those in the same political party as the leader who lost – defend election integrity by challenging the leader’s false narrative. The fact that these sources do so in opposition to their own political interests renders their statements more convincing.

To quantify the success of these tactics, Carey et al. conducted three studies. The first (involving 2,643 people) examined how prebunking and credible source corrections repaired election confidence before the 2022 US midterm elections. Participants interacted with factual short articles about the elections, short articles citing credible sources, or a placebo.

The second (involving 2,949 people) mirrored the first study’s methods, looking at the effects of prebunking and credible source corrections after Brazil’s 2022 presidential election. For both studies, prebunking was most successful in re-establishing election confidence. Credible source corrections also proved successful, but less consistently so.

In the third study (involving 2,030 people), the authors examined whether prebunking with a forewarning message that shared conspiracies worked better or worse than prebunking without it. This study focused on the 2022 US midterm elections and also considered expectations about the upcoming 2024 US general election. Prebunking without exposure to conspiracies was far more effective, likely because exposure induced skepticism toward subsequent factual articles. Notably, both tactics had the biggest impact on those who were already the most misinformed.

“Together, these approaches are practical, efficient, and scalable – key traits for real-world implementation by civil society groups, journalists, or election agencies,” Natalia Bueno suggests in a related Focus. “Equally promising is the fact that these strategies are relatively low-cost. Prebunking messages can be delivered in brief posts, using publicly available information.”

Bibliographic information:

John M. Carey, Brian Fogarty, Marília Gehrke, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, Prebunking and credible source corrections increase election credibility: Evidence from the US and Brazil, Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv3758