Rage Farming

Saying out loud (or to yourself) which persuasion technique is being used on you activates persuasion knowledge and turns an automatic response into a deliberate one.

Ask how you will feel about this choice in ten minutes, ten months, and ten years, which pulls the decision out of the present emotional state that a persuader is working on.

Putting the emotion you are experiencing into words ("I am frightened", "I am furious") reduces its intensity and restores deliberate thinking, which makes fear-, anger-, and shame-based persuasion less effective.

Lower your physiological arousal with a few minutes of slow breathing, movement, or distance before engaging with a high-stakes decision, because choices made in "hot" states differ from the ones you would endorse when calm.

Before sharing anything, ask yourself one question, "Is this accurate?", because most sharing of false content comes not from belief but from inattention to accuracy, and the question alone measurably improves what people pass on.

Open and read the piece before you react to it or pass it on, because headlines are written to be clicked and shared, routinely claim more than the article supports, and shape what you remember even after you have read the correction in paragraph six.

Before reacting to a story, photo, or video, find out when it was first published or recorded, because genuine but old material recirculated as if it were new is one of the cheapest and most common forms of misinformation.

A four-move routine for anything you meet online: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to their original context; it takes under a minute and replaces the instinct to study the page itself.

Expose yourself in advance to a weakened, clearly labelled dose of a manipulation technique together with its refutation, so that when the full-strength version arrives you recognize the move instead of being carried by it.

When you correct a falsehood, put the true statement in the headline, subject line, first sentence, and image, and keep the false claim out of those positions, because most of the audience will see only that part and will carry away whatever it says.

Use the aggregated judgment of a small, politically mixed group, instead of your own reading or that of your like-minded friends, to assess whether a story is accurate; averaged ratings from a balanced crowd of laypeople track professional fact-checkers surprisingly well.

Check what you believe the other side thinks of your side against actual survey data, because partisans in many countries greatly overestimate how much their opponents dislike, dehumanize, and wish to obstruct them, and that exaggerated belief itself drives hostility.