Disinformation and Teens: Polling Insights by NTCenter

NTCenter’s activities in the domain of disinformation cover a wide portfolio: analytical work based on cognitive science and neuroscience, development of solutions for education, media and information literacy and science communication.

Recently, we worked with a large group of teens (15-19), where we ran a few questions before and after our interventions. A few among those were interesting, and we thought we’d share them with the professional community.

• Testing the perceived understanding of the workings of information in a digital environment (“I think I understand how information influences me”), the pre-intervention average was 3.52 (on a 5-point Likert scale), with a post-intervention average of 4.16. With n=132 (for the full set of answers) and an estimated Cohen’s d of 0.8, we are looking at a large effect, and a p-value of <0.0001 (highly significant, well below <0.001).
• A focus on the impact of disinformation (“According to you, disinformation negatively impacts:…”) with a provided set of answers (multiple choice possible), and an interesting result comes from the answer “It impacts others more than myself”. Pre-intervention share is 12.04%, post-intervention share is 7.58%, a significant drop of 37%.
• Testing the perception of malicious intent and roles (“The people who create disinformation understand the mechanisms of the human reactions and use them to manipulate the opinions and behaviours of others”, we get a pre-intervention average of 3.49 and a post-intervention average of 3.79, again on a 5-point Likert scale. This corresponds to a Cohen’s d of 0.38 (small-to-medium effect) and a highly significant shift (p-value of <0.00005, way less than < 0.001).
• When asked about the importance of “understanding conspiracy theories”, respondents indicate that this is “very important for building critical thinking” (47%) and “necessary for protecting from their influence” (56%).
• Taking this a step further, when presented statements on the characteristics of conspiracy theories, respondents indicate that they “provoke curiosity” (88%), are “connected to secret societies” (29%), are “dangerous” (25%), “uncover truths and secrets” (21%), their “followers sound confident and convincing” (21%), and only a small fraction considers conspiracy theories to be “harmless” (8%).

The results underscore that our interventions were effective, with a large effect and highly significant change with regard to how digital stimuli trigger a chain of events in the brain, the CNS and the endocrine system, and to the psychophysiology of emotions. A small-to-medium effect was achieved in increasing the awareness of how malicious actors may be exploiting these vulnerabilities to influence our thoughts and actions. The results also help us better understand how teenagers think about conspiracy theories – and it seems important to emphasize that while they understand the importance of staying protected and with a critical mind, they also exhibit a natural and healthy curiosity, which should be preserved and nurtured. Interventions regarding conspiracy theories must find that balance and use curiosity to advance critical thinking and build cognitive resilience.

The specially-designed training interventions with students are part of NTCenter’s media and information literacy activities under BROD – The Bulgarian-Romanian Digital Observatory, part of the EDMO network of regional hubs.