This makes it harder for people to find trustworthy and reliable information when they need it. In fact, the spread of misleading information about the virus has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to warn of an on-going “infodemic” or an overabundance of information-especially misinformation-during an epidemic ( World Health Organization, 2020b Zarocostas, 2020). In the absence of an effective treatment or vaccine, researchers have pointed out that managing the pandemic response will require leveraging insights from the social and behavioral sciences, particularly with regard to non-pharmaceutical interventions and containing the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 ( Depoux et al., 2020 Habersaat et al., 2020 Van Bavel et al., 2020). The emergence of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in December of 2019 has quickly led to a global pandemic claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide already ( Roser et al., 2020). In particular, we discuss the theory of psychological inoculation (or prebunking) as an efficient vehicle for conferring large-scale psychological resistance against fake news. In response, we explore how insights from the behavioral sciences can be leveraged to manage an effective societal response to curb the spread of misinformation about the virus. We detail the scope of the problem and discuss the negative influence that COVID-19 misinformation can have on the widespread adoption of health protective behaviors in the population. In this article, we explore the coronavirus “infodemic” and how behavioral scientists may seek to address this problem. The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. 2Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, United States.1Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, Department of Psychology, School of Biology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.Sander van der Linden 1*, Jon Roozenbeek 1 and Josh Compton 2
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