Chapter 37: Exercises — Cognitive Defense and Inoculation

Reflection Exercises

Exercise 1: Knowledge Without Immunity Recall a specific instance where you believed, shared, or were emotionally moved by something that later turned out to be false or misleading — despite having some level of media literacy education. Describe the experience honestly. What manipulation technique was operating? Why didn't your knowledge protect you in that moment?

Exercise 2: Your Cognitive Vulnerabilities Every person has domains where they are more susceptible to misinformation or manipulation than others — topics where emotional investment overrides critical thinking. Identify two or three such domains for yourself. What makes these areas particularly difficult to evaluate objectively? This reflection requires intellectual honesty that is itself a form of cognitive defense.

Exercise 3: The Automatic Response Inventory For one day, keep a log of every time you share, like, or engage with social media content automatically — without pausing to evaluate accuracy or purpose. At the end of the day, review the log. What proportion of your engagement was automatic? What types of content triggered the most automatic responses?

Exercise 4: Mapping Your Misinformation History Over the past year, identify three pieces of information you believed and later discovered were false, exaggerated, or misleading. For each: where did you encounter it, why did it seem credible, what made you eventually doubt it, and what does this reveal about your specific vulnerability patterns?

Exercise 5: The Inoculation Self-Assessment After learning about the six manipulation techniques from the Bad News game (impersonation, emotional appeals, polarization, conspiracy, discrediting sources, trolling), score yourself on how well you would recognize each in the wild. Where are your weakest spots? Design a brief practice exercise for your weakest area.

Skill-Building Exercises

Exercise 6: The Bad News Game Play the Bad News game (badnewsgame.com) in its entirety. After playing, write a 400-word reflection: What did you learn about misinformation production that you didn't know before? Did the role-reversal (becoming a misinformation producer) change how you see the content you encounter?

Exercise 7: Lateral Reading Practice — Round 1 Select five unfamiliar websites that contain political, health, or scientific claims. For each, spend no more than 30 seconds on the site itself, then immediately open a new tab and search for the site's name plus "reliability" or "bias." Based on what you find externally, rank the sites from most to least reliable. Compare your rankings to assessments from established fact-checking organizations.

Exercise 8: Lateral Reading Practice — Round 2 Find a news story that originated from a source you're unfamiliar with. Before reading the full story, use lateral reading to establish: Who runs this outlet? What is its funding? What do external sources say about its accuracy? Has it been fact-checked? Write a brief source assessment and then read the story. Does your assessment change how you receive the content?

Exercise 9: Vertical vs. Lateral Comparison Select one unfamiliar website. First, use vertical reading (read the About page, examine internal citations, assess visual credibility, check internal consistency) for five minutes and rate its credibility. Then use lateral reading for five minutes and rate its credibility again. Compare your methods and results. Which produced a more accurate assessment? Which was faster?

Exercise 10: The Accuracy Nudge Self-Experiment For one week, before sharing any piece of social media content, pause and ask: "How confident am I that this is accurate?" Rate your confidence (1-5) and record it. At the end of the week, fact-check five of the things you shared. How well calibrated was your confidence? Did the pause affect your sharing decisions?

Exercise 11: Prebunking Practice Write a brief "inoculation text" (200 words) for a topic where you think someone you know is vulnerable to misinformation. The text should: name the manipulation technique likely to be used, give an example of what it looks like, and preemptively explain why it's misleading. This exercise requires you to understand both the manipulation technique and the psychological mechanism behind it.

Analysis and Research Exercises

Exercise 12: The Pennycook and Rand Research Find and read Pennycook et al.'s 2021 Nature paper on accuracy nudges ("Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online"). Write a critical summary covering: the experimental design, the headline finding (15% reduction in misinformation sharing), the proposed mechanism, and the limitations. What would be needed to scale this to actual platform deployment?

Exercise 13: Inoculation Decay Analysis Research suggests that inoculation effects decay over time without reinforcement. Design a study that would measure: the duration of inoculation effects, the optimal timing for booster interventions, and whether different types of inoculation (game-based vs. text-based vs. video) show different decay rates. What would this study require to be methodologically sound?

Exercise 14: The Stanford History Education Group Research Find and review the Stanford History Education Group's reports on "Civic Online Reasoning" (available at sheg.stanford.edu). Summarize their key findings about how students, historians, and fact-checkers differ in source evaluation. What specific curriculum recommendations do they make based on their research?

Exercise 15: Media Literacy Program Evaluation Research three media literacy programs that have been formally evaluated (find peer-reviewed evaluations or official evaluation reports). Compare: their educational approach (conceptual vs. procedural), their evaluation methods, their outcome measures, and their reported effectiveness. What distinguishes the more effective programs from the less effective?

Exercise 16: The Continued Influence Effect The "continued influence effect" holds that false information keeps influencing beliefs even after correction. Find two peer-reviewed papers on this effect. Summarize what the research shows about why corrections fail, under what conditions they are most and least effective, and what this implies for debunking strategies.

Application Exercises

Exercise 17: Inoculation Message Design The Bad News game uses six manipulation techniques. Choose one technique (emotional appeals, polarization, or conspiracy are good options) and design an inoculation message for a general audience that: explains the technique clearly, gives a concrete example, explains why it's manipulative, and helps readers recognize it in the future. Keep it under 300 words.

Exercise 18: The Mindfulness Check-In Practice For one week, practice a 30-second mindfulness check-in before picking up your phone: notice what you're feeling (boredom? anxiety? curiosity? loneliness?), identify what you're hoping to get from the phone, and notice whether that hope is realistic. Keep a brief daily log. At the end of the week, review the patterns in your emotional states and phone pickup behavior.

Exercise 19: Designing a Metacognitive Prompt Pennycook and Rand's accuracy nudge is effective when novel but decays with repeated exposure. Design a set of five different accuracy prompts (different wording, different framings) that could be rotated to maintain novelty. Explain the psychological mechanism each prompt is designed to activate and why variation matters.

Exercise 20: The Autonomy Audit Review your social media activity from the past week. For each significant engagement (posting, sharing, spending more than 5 minutes on a feed), classify it as: autonomous (you chose this because it served your purposes), platform-directed (you were there because a notification or recommendation took you there), or ambiguous. What proportion of your engagement was genuinely autonomous?

Exercise 21: Platform Mechanics Education Explain to someone who has never studied this subject — use a family member or friend — how recommendation algorithms work, using only an analogy or everyday comparison (no technical terms). Then ask them: did the explanation change anything about how they think about social media? Report on the conversation.

Critical Thinking Exercises

Exercise 22: The Scale Problem Cognitive defense skills require education, practice, and reinforcement. Designing, deploying, and maintaining effective cognitive defense programs for the global social media user base (4+ billion people, across hundreds of languages and cultures) would require resources and infrastructure that don't exist. Write a 500-word analysis of this scale problem: Is population-scale cognitive defense achievable? What would it require? What are the limits of the individual-skill approach to a structural problem?

Exercise 23: Who Gets Inoculated? Inoculation programs like Bad News have been deployed at scale and show consistent effects. But participation in such programs is voluntary, and the people who choose to engage with media literacy interventions may already be less susceptible to misinformation than those who don't. Write a 400-word analysis of this "preaching to the choir" problem: How do you reach people who haven't sought out cognitive defense education?

Exercise 24: The Neutrality Problem Media literacy and cognitive defense education face a persistent challenge: appearing politically neutral while teaching skills whose application inevitably has political implications. For example, teaching students to fact-check claims and use lateral reading will reveal that some sources are more reliable than others — a conclusion that feels politically loaded to some. How should educators navigate this? Write a 500-word discussion.

Exercise 25: Knowledge vs. Behavior — Why the Gap? The chapter notes a consistent gap between knowledge gains (people learn what media literacy programs teach) and behavior change (they don't evaluate media differently afterward). Draw on your knowledge of habit formation, dual-process cognition (System 1 and System 2 thinking), and behavior change research to explain why this gap exists. What would a curriculum designed to close the gap look like?

Discussion and Group Exercises

Exercise 26: The Inoculation Role-Play In groups of three, conduct the following role-play: one person plays a social media post making a false claim using emotional manipulation; one person plays a media-literacy-unaware user responding to the post; one person plays a user who has been inoculated. How does the inoculated user respond differently? What does this reveal about the mechanism of inoculation?

Exercise 27: Lateral Reading Speed Test As a class or group, have all participants evaluate the same five unfamiliar sources, half using vertical reading and half using lateral reading. Compare: accuracy of assessments, time required, and confidence levels. Debrief on what the comparison reveals.

Exercise 28: The Debunking vs. Prebunking Debate Divide into two groups. One argues that prebunking (inoculation before exposure) is the superior strategy for reducing misinformation harm. The other argues that debunking (correction after exposure) is more practical at scale because it doesn't require anticipating which misinformation will spread. After the debate, work together to design a hybrid approach.

Exercise 29: Designing School Curriculum In small groups, design a one-semester media literacy and cognitive defense curriculum for 10th-grade students. Specify: weekly topics, specific skill components, assessment methods, and how you'll address the knowledge-behavior gap. Present your curriculum to the class and receive feedback.

Exercise 30: The Platform Response Thought Experiment If platforms were required to implement accuracy nudges (as Pennycook and Rand research suggests would reduce misinformation sharing), how might they implement them in ways that satisfy the technical requirement while minimizing effects on engagement? This thought experiment explores the tension between regulatory compliance and platform incentives.

Research and Writing Exercises

Exercise 31: Inoculation Literature Review Write a 600-word review of the inoculation theory research, covering: the original McGuire (1964) framework, van der Linden's contemporary applications, the Bad News game studies, and the evidence on inoculation decay. Evaluate the state of the evidence: How confident should we be in the effectiveness and generalizability of inoculation interventions?

Exercise 32: Media Literacy Across Cultures Research whether media literacy and lateral reading interventions have been studied in non-Western or non-English-speaking contexts. What does the cross-cultural evidence show? Are there significant differences in how manipulation techniques work, or in how cognitive defense education is received, across different cultural contexts?

Exercise 33: The Mindfulness-Manipulation Connection Research the relationship between mindfulness and misinformation susceptibility or manipulation resistance. Find at least two peer-reviewed studies. Summarize what the evidence shows about whether mindfulness training reduces susceptibility to manipulation, and what the proposed mechanism is.

Exercise 34: Designing a Longitudinal Study Most cognitive defense research measures short-term effects. Design a longitudinal study that would test whether cognitive defense education produces durable (12+ months) behavioral effects. Specify: sample, intervention, control condition, outcome measures, timeline, and potential confounds. What are the practical challenges of running such a study?

Exercise 35: The Full Picture Essay Write a 1,000-word essay arguing that cognitive defense education, though genuinely valuable, is inherently insufficient to address the scale of harms caused by algorithmic manipulation. Your essay should: acknowledge the real value of cognitive defense, explain why it cannot substitute for structural reform, and describe what the combination of individual-level defense and structural-level reform would look like.