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?