A misinformation playbook sharpens judgement without breeding cynicism

Abstract

Misinformation harms public health and democracy, and generative artificial intelligence now writes falsehoods as persuasive as people's. Defences range from fact-checking individual claims to training people to resist falsehoods. Yet many claims are too new to check, and interventions that teach doubt can reduce belief in truth too. We propose a defence that targets not the facts of each claim but the persuasion strategies that recur across them. Here we show that learning misinformation's persuasion playbook, mapped from 214,646 fact-checked claims in 51 languages, can sharpen human and machine judgement of claims they know little about, without making either more cynical about true claims. The playbook spans social influence, information manipulation and emotional appeals, combined around a core of fear, conspiracy and fabrication. Briefed with it, plus a reminder that persuasion is not proof of falsehood, a language model better distinguished true from machine-generated false claims about events after its training data. In a pre-registered experiment, the same briefing improved people's discernment of claims they reported as unfamiliar and left their belief in true claims unchanged. Averaged over all claims, the gain was not statistically significant. Because it targets what recurs, this defence need not wait for claim-specific fact-checks.