The Attention Machine

← For You

For Educators

Curriculum resources, research, and the organisations doing the most useful work. The evidence on what works in classrooms is clearer than you might expect.

How to read this page. Tap any underlined word to see the precise term and a short definition. Expand any "Deeper" box for the evidence and contested points. The main text works on its own — you can skip both and still get the whole argument.

The inoculation approach — what the evidence shows

Cambridge University researchers (van der Linden et al., 2022, Science Advances) have shown across multiple peer-reviewed studies that exposing students to weakened doses of manipulation techniques — rather than specific false claims — produces durable resistance to future manipulation. The effect is consistent across political affiliations, age groups, and education levels.

The practical implication: media literacy education that focuses on how manipulation works (prebunking) is more effective than education that focuses on specific false claims (debunking). You cannot debunk every false claim. You can inoculate against the techniques that produce them.

Tools and resources

Bad News game — getbadnews.com — 10 minutes, browser-based, free. Teaches six manipulation techniques from the inside. Developed by DROG and Cambridge University. Peer-reviewed evidence for the inoculation effect. Works from age 14 upward. Has been used in classrooms across Europe. Start here.

Breaking Harmony Square — harmonysquare.game — Cambridge/Jigsaw prebunking game focused specifically on political manipulation. Companion to the Bad News game, different content.

Cambridge prebunking curriculum — freely available via the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab (sdmlab.psychol.cam.ac.uk). Structured lesson plans accompanying the inoculation theory research.

Adolescence (Netflix, 2025) — dramatised account of a teenage boy's manosphere radicalisation. Not a documentary but accurate in its portrayal. Discussion guide available. Widely used in secondary schools across Europe. Most effective when watched with students and discussed, not shown without facilitation.

Dutch resources

Netwerk Mediawijsheid — mediawijsheid.nl — The Dutch national media literacy network. Primary resource for Dutch educators. Curriculum materials, professional development, and the annual Mediawijsheid Kennisdag.

What the research says about phone policies

Research consistently supports school phone bans. Countries and districts that have implemented phone-free school policies document improvements in student focus, sleep quality reported on school days, and social interaction during breaks. The resistance, when it comes, tends to come from parents rather than students. Framing the policy as a wellbeing intervention rather than a discipline measure produces better stakeholder engagement.

Deeper — how strong is the classroom evidence, and what are its limits +

The inoculation approach is unusually well-evidenced for an education intervention: multiple randomised studies, including large field tests of short prebunking videos on YouTube (Roozenbeek, van der Linden and colleagues, 2022, Science Advances), show people become measurably better at spotting manipulation techniques, and the effect holds across political affiliations. That breadth — working regardless of where a student sits politically — is part of why it suits a classroom.

The honest limits. Two caveats matter for planning. First, effects decay: a single session fades over weeks unless followed by "booster" exposure, so prebunking works best as repeated practice, not a one-off assembly. Second, most measurement is of technique-recognition in test conditions; durable change in real-world sharing and belief is harder to demonstrate and still being studied. None of this undercuts the approach — it is the best-supported option available — but it argues for treating it as an ongoing skill, regularly refreshed, rather than a vaccine given once.

The Wider Ecosystem →