On prebunking and response bias: skepicism and gullibility biases can each be 'functional' if the source of the information is detected by the recipient. Notably, information from politicians and information from close family can benefit from one or other response bias. Gaming an ability to detect the source might be useful 'inoculation'.
On samplng error: the best descripton of this I've seen is the YouTube video about US statistician Abraham Wald. He proved that because returning bombers had few bullet holes in their engine or cockpit, those were the areas that should be armour-plated.
the idea about sources is a good one - it would be interesting to look at the inoculation training and see how much of it is really training to focus on the source. It could be that people improve their discrimination on the task because they learn to pay more attention to the source. That's an example of the kind of common method bias that I was thinking off, when I wrote about limitations of the study. We could then discuss whether someone who is better at spotting misinformation because they attend to sources is "really" better at spotting misinformation - is this the sort of improvement we think will generalise usefully to the real world of the information ecosystem?
This is really fascinating. I've been following this debate for a while, and this was a great summary + thoughts. Thank you!
On prebunking and response bias: skepicism and gullibility biases can each be 'functional' if the source of the information is detected by the recipient. Notably, information from politicians and information from close family can benefit from one or other response bias. Gaming an ability to detect the source might be useful 'inoculation'.
On samplng error: the best descripton of this I've seen is the YouTube video about US statistician Abraham Wald. He proved that because returning bombers had few bullet holes in their engine or cockpit, those were the areas that should be armour-plated.
the idea about sources is a good one - it would be interesting to look at the inoculation training and see how much of it is really training to focus on the source. It could be that people improve their discrimination on the task because they learn to pay more attention to the source. That's an example of the kind of common method bias that I was thinking off, when I wrote about limitations of the study. We could then discuss whether someone who is better at spotting misinformation because they attend to sources is "really" better at spotting misinformation - is this the sort of improvement we think will generalise usefully to the real world of the information ecosystem?