Preventing Violence Through Inoculation

Inoculation is a theory-based, time-tested approach to preventing persuasion. Although inoculation has been shown to be effective across multiple domains, these applications have historically been limited to traditional communicative contexts (e.g., health communication). Still, emergent scholarship has demonstrated inoculation to be effective for preventing psychological outcomes associated with an area of increasing concern—violence. This chapter discusses recent scholarship that has evaluated the efficacy of inoculation for preventing the adoption of beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors related to violent activity. Some of these areas include violent ideological extremism, violence in schools, gang-related violence, and domestic violence. This chapter will also comment on how inoculation practices can be optimized by considering message timing, dosage, and source credibility.