Is the COVID-19 bad news game good news? Testing whether creating and disseminating fake news about vaccines in a computer game reduces people's belief in anti-vaccine arguments

Improving vaccination eagerness is crucial, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and establishing new procedures to achieve that goal is highly important. Previous research (Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019a, 2019b) has indicated that playing the Bad News game, in which a player spreads fake news to gain followers, reduces people's belief in fake news. The goal of the present paper was to test an analogous new game called COVID-19 Bad News (CBN) to improve one's eagerness to vaccinate against coronavirus. CBN was constructed to examine whether creating and disseminating fake news focused on vaccinations and the COVID-19 pandemic has a similar effect and improves people's attitudes toward vaccination. Two experiments were conducted where participants played CBN or Tetris and afterwards evaluated the credibility of statements about vaccines against COVID-19 and finally filled out a questionnaire concerning their attitudes toward vaccination. The results show that playing CBN does not reduce evaluations of the credibility of all statements that are un-favorable to vaccines (false as well as true). Additionally, it does not enhance readiness to vaccinate. Future research and limitations are discussed.

Automated summary

Improving vaccination eagerness is crucial, and a new game called COVID-19 Bad News (CBN) was tested to see if spreading fake news about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic could improve attitudes toward vaccination. Two experiments were conducted where participants played CBN or Tetris and then evaluated the credibility of vaccine-related statements and filled out a questionnaire about their attitudes. The results showed that playing CBN did not reduce evaluations of unfavorable vaccine statements or enhance readiness to vaccinate.