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Bad News Game | Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab
websdmlab.psychol.cam.ac.uk·sdmlab.psychol.cam.ac.uk/research/bad-news-game
Relevant to AI safety discussions around AI-generated disinformation and deepfakes; demonstrates a behavioral intervention approach to building public resilience against manipulation tactics that AI systems can automate and scale.
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Summary
The Bad News Game is a browser-based psychological inoculation tool developed by Cambridge's Social Decision-Making Lab that places players in the role of a misinformation producer, teaching them to recognize manipulation tactics used in disinformation campaigns. By actively experiencing how fake news is constructed, players build cognitive resistance ('prebunking') against future manipulation. Research shows the game measurably improves players' ability to identify and discount misinformation.
Key Points
- •Uses 'inoculation theory': exposing players to weakened doses of misinformation tactics to build resistance before encountering real disinformation
- •Players role-play as misinformation creators, learning six common manipulation techniques including impersonation, emotional provocation, and conspiracy framing
- •Empirically validated: studies show significant improvements in discernment of fake vs. real content after gameplay
- •Relevant to AI safety as synthetic media and AI-generated disinformation (deepfakes, LLM content) scale these manipulation tactics dramatically
- •Part of broader 'prebunking' research program that has influenced platforms like Google/YouTube to deploy similar inoculation-style interventions
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI-Era Epistemic Security | Approach | 63.0 |
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Bad News Game | Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab
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The Bad News Game is a multiple award-winning fake news intervention aimed at building psychological resistance against online misinformation. The intervention is a theory-driven social impact game developed in collaboration with the Dutch media collective DROG and graphic design agency Gusmanson.
The game is freely available for non-commercial use and can be accessed here: www.getbadnews.com
The game draws on the theory of psychological inoculation: just as exposu
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