Bad News Game | Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab

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sdmlab.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

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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 exposure to a weakened strain of a pathogen triggers the production of antibodies to cultivate immunity against a virus, the same can reasonably be achieved with information. Specifically, the game forewarns and exposes players to severely weakened doses of the stategies that are used in the production of fake news to stimulate the production 'mental antibodies' against misinformation.

 If you are interested in our research on the game, please find an up-to-date list of all of our scientific publications below (open-access, open data):

 Publications 

 Simchon, A., Zipori, T., Teitelbaum, L., Lewandowsky, S., & van der Linden, S. (2025). A Signal Detection Theory Meta-Analysis of Psychological Inoculation Against Misinformation. Current Opinion in Psychology , 102194.
 Werner Axelsson, A., Nygren, T., Roozenbeek, J., & van der Linden, S. (2024). Bad News in the Classroom: How Serious Gameplay Fosters Teenagers' Ability to Discern Manipulation Techniques . Journal of Research on Technology in Education .
 Traberg, C. S., Roozenbeek, J., &van der Linden, S.(2024). Gamified inoculation reduces susceptibility to misinformation from political ingroups. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. 
 Roozenbeek, J., Traberg, C.S., van der Linden, S. (2022). T echnique-based inoculation against real-world misinformation . Royal Society Open Science 9 , 211719.
 Maertens, R., Roozenbeek, J., Simons, J., Lewandowsky, S., Maturo, V., Goldberg, B., ... & van der Linden, S. (2025). Psychological booster shots targeting memory increase long-term resistance against misinformation . Nature Communications. 
 Basol, M., Roozenbeek, J., Berriche, M., Uenal, F., McClanahan, W.P., & van der Linden, S. (2021). Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation . Big Data & Society 
 Maertens, R., Roozenbeek, J., Basol, M., & van der Linden, S. (2020). Long-term effectiveness of inoculation against misinformation: Three longitudinal experiments . Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. 
 Roozenbeek, J., Maertens, R., McClanahan, W.P., & van der Linden, S.(2020). Differentiating item and testing effects in inoculation research on online misinformation: Solomon revisited . Educational and Psychological Measurement. 
 van der Linden, S., & Roozenbeek, J. (2020). Psyc

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