Celebrating Progress in 2024 & Preparing for More in 2025

Our year in review and plans for 2025

As the year draws to a close, the Mental Immunity Project (MIP) is taking a moment to reflect on what we achieved in 2024. Thanks to the support of our incredible community, we’ve made major strides in our mission to help everyone develop immunity to misinformation and manipulative content online.

2024

Here’s an overview of what we accomplished in 2024:

• We published our paper in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

  Earlier this month, our paper Do Minds Have Immunity Systems? was published. It lays the groundwork for a new scientific theory—Mental Immune Systems Theory, or MIST—to help explain why some people are more susceptible to misinformation than others.

  Full Paper | Paper Overview

• Designed and released free lesson plans and learning materials

  Led by our Education Director Melanie Trecek-King, we shared five lesson plans for middle and high school teachers to use in their classrooms to help inoculate students against misinformation and foster better thinking skills, adding to our growing library of free educational resources available on the MIP website. We also shared 19 modules in our What Works to Build Mental Immunity series and several infographics about the psychology of misinformation. Check out our latest Lesson Plan about Science Denial

  Our Lesson Plans page | What Works Modules | Psych of Misinformation

• Hosted several successful workshops, including one for the Williamsville Central School District in October, where 87% of teachers agreed that after the workshop they felt more confident in their ability to cultivate critical thinking and other misinformation-resilience strategies.

• Presented at major conferences, such as the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) conference in November, and the Science Teachers Association of New York State (STANYS) Conference in Syracuse in November, to raise awareness about mental immunity and our free educational resources for teachers.

• Continued to grow our Substack, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube followings with a steady stream of engaging content related to mental immunity and critical thinking.

• Launched a redesigned website in August to make it easier for educators, students, and other learners to navigate.

• Featured ten guest essays on our Substack.

And we’re not stopping there. We’re already hard at work planning for 2025.

2025

Here’s what we’ll be focusing on in the new year:

• Expanding our Mental Immunity to Manipulative Information Campaign (MIMIC) by creating more lesson plans and educational resources and continuing to share them with educators via workshops and conferences.

• Gathering data on the effectiveness of our lesson plans and educational content so we can improve and refine our approach.

• Developing our coalition of organizations and individuals who are working to address the problems of misinformation and disinformation.

• Continuing to grow our Substack, with more guest posts and op-eds on topics related to mental immunity and critical thinking.

• Cultivating relationships with academic institutions in Pittsburgh and elsewhere to advance research on mental immunity.

• Validating a mental immunity scale to help us better understand and measure people’s susceptibility to misinformation. We are excited to assess early results from our collaborators at the University of Toronto, who have been using the scale in their research.

Support the Mental Immunity Project

We are incredibly grateful for your support and we are excited to continue working together to build a world where everyone has the mental immunity they need to thrive in the digital age.

With the new year right around the corner, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to our End-of-Year fundraiser. Every dollar makes a difference.

Have a happy new year!