Discussion
alertness
DER
The present study validated the effectiveness of a game-based inoculation in improving the perceived credibility and sharing intention of misinformation in China. The results support the efficacy of an intervention based on inoculation theory in countering misinformation. After the intervention, participants who accepted both game-based and graphic-based methods showed reduced perceived credibility and sharing intention of misinformation. This means that inoculation can activate people’s alertness to misinformation, allowing them to form more confident refutations of misinformation, thus reducing their acceptance of it and enabling them to understand and reject it better (van der Linden, Additionally, the game-based intervention (For the graphic-based intervention, we found that the perceived credibility of misinformation was not significantly different from the control group at the post-test stage. However, a significant decrease in perceived credibility was observed specifically during the follow-up stage, indicating the presence of a sleeper effect associated with passive inoculation. That means passive inoculation may undergo a process of enhancement before decaying. This result is consistent with the view of McGuire's, the proposer of inoculation theory: To enable individuals to develop arguments in defense of their attitude, it was imperative to introduce a time gap between the inoculation treatment and the attack message. This delay facilitated the necessary cognitive processing and response generation (Banas & Rains, This study further examined the effects of inoculation on the perceived credibility and sharing intention of accurate information. The results showed that neither the game-based nor graphic-based intervention affected the perceived credibility and sharing intention of accurate information, indicating that the inoculation intervention did not weaken susceptibility to all information.In practical applications, the game-based intervention designed in this study has advantages for implementing measures related to misinformation. This online gaming intervention can be implemented in a larger population, and with an increasing number of internet users, the intervention method is more suitable for social media dissemination than traditional offline or online teaching modes in terms of intervention time and scope (van der Linden et al., This study has some limitations. First, regarding the measurement materials, the misinformation measurement tool used in this study lacks standardization, which could lead to difficulties in comparing the results across different studies (Maertens et al., 