Re-examining the bad news game: no evidence of improved discrimination of Indian true and fake news headlines
The title says what it found. Seabrooke, with Ariana Modirrousta-Galian and Philip Higham, re-examined the Bad News game using Indian true and fake news headlines in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, and reported no evidence of improved discrimination between the two. It is the second negative result on this site about these games, and it does not simply repeat the first. Modirrousta-Galian's reanalysis had found the games moving response bias, making people more sceptical of everything without helping them sort. This study found no reliable shift in bias either, once both counterbalancing conditions were included, with the more cautious responding appearing only in the single condition that matched the earlier experiment being re-examined. So the two negative findings agree that the advertised benefit is absent and disagree about the consolation prize. Read against the original evaluations, which reported the games as improving fake news detection, the claim under challenge is the one the deployments rested on. Three limits belong on the page. The sample was 150, small beside the figures usually quoted in this area. It re-examines another group's Indian sample study with counterbalancing added, by overlapping authors, so it is not an independent replication and should not be called one. And the research group behind the original games has since published a paper testing feedback exercises as a fix, which this site also cites, so nobody should read this as establishing that gamified inoculation cannot work.
The title says what it found. Seabrooke, with Ariana Modirrousta-Galian and Philip Higham, re-examined the Bad News game using Indian true and fake news headlines in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, and reported no evidence of improved discrimination between the two. It is the second negative result on this site about these games, and it does not simply repeat the first. Modirrousta-Galian's reanalysis had found the games moving response bias, making people more sceptical of everything without helping them sort. This study found no reliable shift in bias either, once both counterbalancing conditions were included, with the more cautious responding appearing only in the single condition that matched the earlier experiment being re-examined. So the two negative findings agree that the advertised benefit is absent and disagree about the consolation prize. Read against the original evaluations, which reported the games as improving fake news detection, the claim under challenge is the one the deployments rested on. Three limits belong on the page. The sample was 150, small beside the figures usually quoted in this area. It re-examines another group's Indian sample study with counterbalancing added, by overlapping authors, so it is not an independent replication and should not be called one. And the research group behind the original games has since published a paper testing feedback exercises as a fix, which this site also cites, so nobody should read this as establishing that gamified inoculation cannot work.
Written from the citation as recorded when this source was checked, and the article on this site built on it.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Verified at the published record 2026-10-05. doi:10.3758/s13423-025-02827-x
Where we use it
- Teaching People to Doubt Everything, Why We Look
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No link available. The citation as the article records it:
Seabrooke, T., Modirrousta-Galian, A., & Higham, P. A. (2025). 'Re-examining the bad news game: no evidence of improved discrimination of Indian true and fake news headlines.' Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Verified at the published record 2026-10-05. doi:10.3758/s13423-025-02827-x