Re-Examining the Bad News Game: No Evidence of Improved Discrimination of Indian True and Fake News Headlines

Abstract

Gamified inoculation interventions such as the Bad News game are a widely adopted approach to mitigating the influence of misinformation. While Bad News has been predominately studied with participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, and Rich Democracies (WEIRD), one recent study (Iyengar et al., 2023) assessed its efficacy in an Indian sample. In that study, participants rated the reliability of a series of Indian news headlines in a pre-test, played Bad News, and completed a post-test with a different set of headlines. Participants showed better discrimination of true and fake headlines in the post-test than the pre-test. This finding contrasts with a meta-analysis showing that Bad News primarily produces a conservative response bias rather than improving discrimination (Modirrousta-Galian & Higham, 2023). The current preregistered study used the same design as Iyengar et al., although participants of Indian nationality (N = 150) were recruited via Prolific and the allocation of news headlines to the pretest and post-test was counterbalanced. When both counterbalancing conditions were included, no significant differences in discrimination or response bias appeared between the pre-test and post-test. When only the counterbalancing condition matching Iyengar et al.’s experiment was examined, no significant effect on discrimination was observed, but a conservative response bias shift was seen in the post-test. This finding suggests that the Bad News game may be less effective for improving discrimination than previously thought—an important consideration given its popularity as an intervention to combat misinformation.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Tina Seabrooke: orcid.org/0000-0002-4119-8389

ORCID for Ariana Modirrousta-Galian: orcid.org/0000-0003-2925-2976

ORCID for Philip A. Higham: orcid.org/0000-0001-6087-7224

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