Protecting against misogyny: Developing an intervention, using Inoculation Theory, to reduce the influence of the manosphere- .

Extreme misogyny is increasingly finding an audience on social media in the so-called

manosphere-
, a community which includes self-styled pick-up artists, mens rights

activists, incels-
(short for involuntary celibates), MGTOW (men going their own way) who

shun any connection to women, and proponents of red pill-
and black pill-
ideologies who

reject the existing social order and claim to have seen the truth-
about gender politics.

What unites these groups within the manosphere is a belief that women are inferior to
men and ought to be subordinated to them.
Teachers, parents and elected officials have begun to report deep concerns about the
influence of the manosphere on young people, particularly on the attitudes and behaviour
of young men (Over et al., 2023; Stahl et al., 2022). A survey commissioned by the charity
Hope not Hate in 2023 found that 80% of 16- and 17-year-old British boys had consumed
content created by Andrew Tate, a notorious online misogynist. In contrast, only 60% of
boys in the same age group had heard of the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. Our
education system is responsible for helping adolescents navigate the world through the
lens of broader social, technological political changes such as those disseminated by the
manosphere, these statistics demonstrate a need for an intervention to help tackle the
rise of the manosphere.
Currently there is a lack of interventions to tackle the rise of hateful misogyny on social
media. A route to protect children from this content would be to demonetise or even ban
extreme misogynistic content. Social media platforms have made some attempts to do
this with limited success (Ali et al., 2021). It is thus crucial to understand how to prepare
young people for the dangerous messages emanating from the manosphere when they
almost inevitably encounter them.
Inoculation theory is a framework for designing interventions aimed at reducing
susceptibility to persuasion and manipulation (McGuire, 1964). The theory uses a
biological metaphor that posits that people can develop psychological resistance against
persuasion and manipulation attempts (Harrop et al., 2023). In medicine, an injected
vaccines contains a weakened version of a disease, not strong enough to overwhelm the
body, but the immune system is triggered to provide inoculation. As such, in a typical
inoculation intervention watered-down versions of negative messages are shown with
counterarguments which allows for inoculation against the messages (Bernard, Maio, &
Olson, 2003). These types of interventions have been successful in reducing belief in:
misinformation about climate change (Cook et al., 2017), vaccines (Wong, 2016), and fake
news (Tragberg et al., 2022).
The overall research question for this project is: can inoculation theory be used as an
advanced model to develop a paradigm designed to prepare both adult and adolescent
males to critically engage with the manosphere? To help answer the overall question, a
preliminary question will also be investigated: will analysing a novel dataset of adolescent
social media histories help us to inform the intervention to increase effectiveness?