Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools

Abstract

<p>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 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 distractive environments. Next, we turn to how psychological science can inform interventions to counteract these challenges of the digital world. After distinguishing between three types of behavioral and cognitive interventions—nudges, technocognition, and boosts—we focus in on boosts, of which we identify two main groups: (1) those aimed at enhancing people’s agency in their digital environments (e.g., self-nudging, deliberate ignorance) and (2) those aimed at boosting competences 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.</p>

Public attitudes towards algorithmic personalization and use of personal data online: Evidence from Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

“…If this explanation is correct, then in order for privacy concerns and behavior to match more closely, the data privacy functions of online services should be more accessible, explained in simpler terms, and easy to use. Behavioral interventions (e.g., digital nudging and boosting; see 26,27) can also be employed to empower users to align their privacy protective measures to their level of privacy concern. New transparency measures could enable people to exercise their preferences in a more nuanced way; this would be an important next step towards regaining autonomy in the online world.…”

How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online

“…Boosting seeks to empower people in the longer term by helping them build the competences they need to navigate situations autonomously (for a conceptual map of boosting interventions online, see also ref. 109 ). These interventions can be integrated directly into the environment itself or be available in an app or browser add-on.…”

The Psychology of Fake News

“…Finally, a salient feature of fake news headlines also seems to be that they are often emotionally evocative. That is, fake news is often geared towards provoking shock, fear, anger [75,76], or (more broadly) moral outrage [77]. This is important because people who report experiencing more emotion (positive or negative) are more likely to believe false (but not true) news; and instructing people to rely on emotion causes increased belief in false (but not true)…”

“…Consistent with this view, work on social media behavior often emphasizes the importance of the "attention economy" where factors relating to "engagement" (likes, shares, comments, clicks, etc.) are selected for in social media environments [75,77,83]. For this reason, it is perhaps unsurprising that sharing of low-quality news content on Facebook is associated with ideological extremity [84] and that ideological concordance is a much strong predictor of sharing than it is of belief [28,33].…”