‘Flooding’ using disinformation

Disinformation strategies are often deployed by professionals to elicit confusion rather than to persuade. One key method for this is 'flooding': inserting a large number of incongruent propositions into the communication environment, with the goal of preventing people from identifying and acting on reliable information. We assess some of the basic elements of this strategy with two pre-registered experimental studies (N = 2607) on the topics of sunscreens and GMOs. We pitted a flooded versus a non-flooded information environment against each other, with varying levels of accurate and inaccurate propositions. Our findings suggest that, in some cases, flooding can influence attitudes, push the evaluation of information into the realm of uncertainty and increase subjective feelings of information overload. We further speculate that flooding may elicit rational inattention and have other downstream consequences such as fatigue and passivity.