LAUSR

Significance Misconceptions can continue to influence their recipients despite correction. Correcting before, with inoculation, or after, with fact-checking, risks increasing audience familiarity with targeted misconceptions. Including forewarnings also risks heightening distrust in accurate information. Moreover, outside experimental settings, individuals reached by misconceptions are not necessarily the ones exposed to corrections. Our preregistered experiments address these concerns by using a mental model approach that, without mentioning the misconception that messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination changes recipients’ DNA, preempts or reactively corrects it and associated unwarranted inferences. The modeled messaging shows how mRNA vaccination works and/or how cells protect themselves from foreign DNA. Such models can be introduced in a live debate or in educational, clinical, or public health settings long before misconception exposure.