Damian Sendler On Recent Disinformation Research
Damian Sendler :What is disinformation research: As part of the report ‘How our thinking drives disinformation’ prepared by the American think tank National Endowment for Democracy, researchers focused on answering the question – why ‘consumers’ under the influence of disinformation reject other sources of information? Scientists, as the main conclusion, indicate that the effectiveness of disinformation may be related to the innate aspects of human psychology. Still, as they emphasize, this does not mean that democratic societies are entirely powerless about information campaigns run by opponents. As researchers predict, in the future, we can expect technologies to have the potential to create false information that manipulation will undoubtedly become even more useful. Therefore, it is necessary to develop mechanisms (this obligation is imposed on the authors by the public, journalists, and “other stakeholders”) to meet the five main challenges.
Read about views on digital epidemiology.
According to researchers, society has an active and passive need for disinformation, which is the first challenge presented in the report. Passive demand, i.e., not requiring conscious reasoning on the part of the individual, and active in which the reader actively takes action to develop conclusions through cognitive processes. The need for disinformation is, in particular, an essential factor for societies that are deeply polarized and have low confidence in the media.
Emotions, Fear
Damian Jacob Sendler : As part of the passive factor, the virality of content spreading plays a vital role. According to the authors, it has been noticed that content that causes extreme emotions such as fear, disgust, admiration and anger is much more often spread. The carriers of these emotions are spreading faster than information that causes sadness. The phenomenon of disinformation, as the authors emphasize, is much favored by the desire to share information via the network that can potentially trigger an emotional response than the willingness to share real information. The frequency with which the user is exposed to false information is also essential – subconscious susceptibility to fake news will be more effective if it is demonstrated at high rate.
What are the research methods revolutionizing research?
Predispositions of the condition of our psychological health that greater exposure to false information can make it appear more reliably. The situation is a bit different in the case of people who have a current need for disinformation. These users, when interacting with information, are exposed to many prejudices. In essence, in these mechanisms, the authors state that two-directional motivations matter: the desire to achieve a specific application and the desire to make the most accurate application. Experts also point out the accompanying misinformation phenomenon of “falsification of preferences” that occurs when people obscure their accurate opinions due to social pressure.
Other Findings
Damian J Sendler: The experts in the report also drew attention to the need to use the achievements of psychology in fact-checking initiatives. It is necessary to know the mechanisms by which people (information consumers) are interested, who are interested in a specific political narrative, in whom it is possible to reject corrective information (i.e., report denying fake news). The authors demonstrate the need to continue research in this area to learn about the psychological mechanisms of this issue to better communicate with recipients challenging to convince.
The future of community psychiatry lies in small hospitals.
Another challenge highlighted in the report is the distrust of societies towards the media and the ability to use them. Therefore, once again (the argument about the need for education is raised regularly), the authors point to the need to make efforts to develop skills in this area. In the case of this challenge, scientists pay attention to the significant role of education in building skills to use, the media, which in their opinion should stand on five pillars – the participation of young people, teacher training and including this issue in the core curriculum, parental support, political initiatives and building evidence base. They noted, however, the dual nature of opinions in the field of building educational foundations. Some experts have praised media literacy as a way to assess false information. In contrast, others say it wrongly places a burden on individuals, unlike social media platforms, decision-makers, or civil society experts.
