The world is awash in misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foremost among them is the “big lie” that President Trump won the 2020 election (he lost by 7 million votes), that Covid-19 is a hoax (it has killed nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. and over 3 million worldwide), that the Covid vaccine implants a microchip created by Bill Gates (it doesn’t), and that Antifa stormed the US Capitol on January 6 (the FBI says it was white supremacists and far right groups, not Antifa). All of these falsehoods remain in circulation despite being repeatedly debunked.

Can you boost your resistance to misinformation? How do you talk to people who believe conspiracy theories? Author Andy Norman, who directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, says it possible to inoculate ourselves against bad ideas. His new book is Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think.

“It’s clear that a large part of the American population have mental immune systems that have been compromised,” says Norman.