Strengthening One’s Defenses against Misinformation: The Role of Prebunking in Teaching Media Literacy

This chapter examines prebunking as a proactive strategy for teaching media literacy and building resilience against misinformation. It argues that fake news is dangerous precisely because it mimics the form of legitimate news while exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities—drawing on Kahneman’s dual-process model, the tendency to register new information as true before evaluating it, and the illusory truth effect, whereby repeated exposure increases perceived accuracy even of implausible or debunked claims. The chapter positions critical thinking as a central defense while stressing its limits, since reasoning is constrained by domain knowledge and bias; it introduces intellectual humility—the recognition that one’s beliefs may be fallible—as a necessary complement, linking it to the Socratic method and to evidence that humble individuals are more likely to investigate and remain open to new perspectives. Grounding prebunking in McGuire and Papageorgis’s inoculation theory, the chapter reviews empirical work on counterfactual messaging and on educational games (Fakey, NewsWise, Go Viral!, Get Bad News), which improve users’ ability to detect manipulation across demographics and languages. It also weighs critiques—notably that gamified interventions may foster more conservative responding rather than genuine veracity discernment—and concludes that prebunking offers longer-lasting protection than reactive debunking.