Inoculating against extremist persuasion techniques – Results from a randomised controlled trial in post-conflict areas in Iraq

Abstract

Extremist organisations often use psychological manipulation techniques to persuade new members to join. Previous research has found that people can be made more aware of such techniques through psychological “inoculation” interventions, which seek to foster resistance against unwanted persuasion attempts. We conducted a field experiment (N = 191) in post-conflict regions of Iraq to assess the effectiveness of a short inoculation game, Radicalise, in improving vulnerable individuals’ resistance against extremist manipulation techniques. In a conceptual replication of Saleh et al. (2021), we translated and adapted the game for the Iraqi context and then conducted a 2x2 mixed (pre-post / treatment-control) randomised controlled experiment among a group of vulnerable youth in areas previously under ISIS control. We included two outcome measures: participants’ ability and confidence in correctly assessing WhatsApp messages making use of extremist manipulation techniques, and the ability to identify the factors that make an individual vulnerable to extremist recruitment. We find that playing the game significantly improved participants’ ability (p = 0.034, d = 0.31) in spotting manipulative messaging while the improvement in participants' confidence fell just above the traditional 0.05 significance level (p = 0.051, d = 0.29). However, unlike in Saleh et al. (2021), we find that playing the game did not impact participants’ ability to identify vulnerable individuals (p = 0.896, d = 0.02). However, we note that our field study may have been underpowered compared to the original study and our results should therefore be interpreted with some caution.