Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools

Abstract

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.

Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking

“…As Brulle et al (2012) noted in the context of climate change, "introducing new messages or information into an otherwise unchanged socioeconomic system will accomplish little" (p. 185). 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). van der Linden ( 2019) postulated several such behavioural avenues, starting with prebunking or inoculation, which is followed where necessary by real-time rebuttal or fact-checking and then debunking if inoculation fails.…”

Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing the spread of misinformation

“…Starting with "fake news" during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (Lazer et al, 2018), and redoubling during the COVID-19 pandemic (Cuan-Baltazar et al, 2020;Loomba et al, 2021;Shahi et al, 2021) and the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election (Chen et al, 2021;Ferrara et al, 2020;Pennycook & Rand, 2021b), there has been widespread concern about the circulation of false and misleading news on social media. In an attempt to address these concerns, a variety of approaches have been proposed to combat the spread of misinformation online (for reviews, see Kozyreva et al, 2020;Pennycook & Rand, 2021a;Van Der Linden et al, 2021).…”

Boosting people’s ability to detect microtargeted advertising

“…For this to happen, a mix of regulation and interventions based on insights and evidence from the behavioral sciences will be indispensable. The promising results in the current study underscore that the behavioral sciences in general, and the boosting approach should play a key role in the research and policy endeavor to help citizens regain some of their individual autonomy in the online world 11 , 30 .…”

“…However, to the extent that people lack relevant self-knowledge 27 , 28 , or fail to spontaneously connect their self-knowledge with the advertisements, then more specific inoculation interventions may be necessary. We tested three inoculation interventions that are all instances of the class of “boosting” interventions, that is, interventions aimed at improving people’s competences to make better decisions in light of their own goals 29 , 30 .…”