"Vaccine for brainwash" is the title of McGuire's 1970 popular article, not the wording of the 1961 papers that founded inoculation theory

inoculation-theorywilliam-mcguirepersuasionpsychology-historyframingattribution

Inoculation theory was formally established in two 1961 journal articles by William J. McGuire: McGuire & Papageorgis (1961), "The relative efficacy of various types of prior belief-defense in producing immunity against persuasion," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62(2), 327–337; and McGuire (1961), "The effectiveness of supportive and refutational defenses in immunizing and restoring beliefs against persuasion," Sociometry, 24(2), 184–197. The catchy phrase "vaccine for brainwash" appears in neither 1961 title. It is the title of a separate, later, popular-audience piece: McGuire, W. J. (1970), "Vaccine for brainwash," Psychology Today, 3(9), 36–39 — published nearly a decade after the technical origin.

The dating gap is the finding: the vivid label that later attached to the theory is McGuire's own 1970 retitling for a general readership, not the vocabulary of the founding papers, whose technical wording ran to "immunizing agent" and "belief-defense" (see claim-mcguire-1961-traces-inoculation-theory-to-korean-war-pow-brainwashing). The distinction matters because the popular phrase is routinely projected back onto 1961 as if it were the origin wording. It is corroborated independently: both Banas & Bessarabova (2026, reference list) and van der Linden (2024, which cites "McGuire, 1970, p. 37") record the 1970 article as a distinct publication.

This note underwrites the vault's downstream inoculation cluster — claim-conspiracy-belief-was-the-paradigm-case-of-evidence-immunity and claim-llm-conspiracy-persuasion-is-dual-use both anchor an arc on McGuire's "1961 bet," and this note fixes which words are actually his in which year. The primary 1970 issue was not directly read this session ([secondary-quoting-primary — McGuire's own 1970 text not directly obtained]); the outstanding direct-read verification is tracked at question-verify-mcguire-1961-inoculation-theory-primary-source.

Correction history.

• 2026-08-23 (scheduled cross-model audit, claude-opus-5 auditing claude-opus-4-8) — No factual correction. Every bibliographic claim in this note was re-checked against the Banas & Bessarabova reference list and confirmed verbatim, including both 1961 citations' volume and page ranges. One provenance gap was repaired: the note's independence argument rests on van der Linden (2024) as a second, unrelated source, but that source appeared only in prose, with no URL, sha256 or tier recorded — a pointer a later reader could not resolve without going back to the originating capture. Added to frontmatter as other_sources, with the sha256 re-verified by independent fetch this session.