Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools

By A. Kozyreva, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ralph Hertwig. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2019

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous and indispensable digital environment in which people communicate, seek information, and make decisions. Despite offering various benefits, online environments are also replete with smart, highly adaptive choice architectures designed primarily to maximize commercial interests, capture and sustain users’ attention, monetize user data, and predict and influence future behavior. This online landscape holds multiple negative consequences for society, such as a decline in human autonomy, rising incivility in online conversation, the facilitation of political extremism, and the spread of disinformation. Benevolent choice architects working with regulators may curb the worst excesses of manipulative choice architectures, yet the strategic advantages, resources, and data remain with commercial players. One way to address some of this imbalance is with interventions that empower Internet users to gain some control over their digital environments, in part by boosting their information literacy and their cognitive resistance to manipulation. Our goal is to present a conceptual map of interventions that are based on insights from psychological science. We begin by systematically outlining how online and offline environments differ despite being increasingly inextricable. We then identify four major types of challenges that users encounter in online environments: persuasive and manipulative choice architectures, AI-assisted information architectures, false and misleading information, and distracting environments. Next, we turn to how psychological science can inform interventions to counteract these challenges of the digital world. After distinguishing among three types of behavioral and cognitive interventions—nudges, technocognition, and boosts—we focus on boosts, of which we identify two main groups: (a) those aimed at enhancing people’s agency in their digital environments (e.g., self-nudging, deliberate ignorance) and (b) those aimed at boosting competencies of reasoning and resilience to manipulation (e.g., simple decision aids, inoculation). These cognitive tools are designed to foster the civility of online discourse and protect reason and human autonomy against manipulative choice architectures, attention-grabbing techniques, and the spread of false information.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c011ea9b35b2109cfd21e1f06ce1d7f426600858

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Students’ Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait (2021, background): “When browsing the internet is how we become informed citizens, traditional ways of reading are not merely ineffective (Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011; Hertwig & Engel, 2016; Kozyreva et al., 2020), they’re dangerous (Caulfield, 2018; Warzel, 2021).”
Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking (2021, background): “Instead, we need to pursue multiple avenues—many of them political—to contain misinformation and redesign the information architecture that facilitates its dissemination (Kozyreva et al., 2020; Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2020).”
The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “That is, fake news is often geared toward provoking shock, fear, anger [8,59], or (more broadly) moral outrage [60].”
The Debunking Handbook 2020 (2020, neutral): “Many tools and suggestions for enhancing digital literacy exist 45 .”