TRUTH DECAYTo Make Children Better Fact-Checkers, Expose Them to More Misinformation — with Oversight
“We need to give children experience flexing these skepticism muscles and using these critical thinking skills within this online context,” a psychology researcher said.
In an era when online misinformation is seemingly everywhere and objective facts are often in dispute, UC Berkeley psychologists in a new study have presented a somewhat paradoxical partial solution: Expose young children to more misinformation online — not less.
Doing so in limited circumstances, and with careful oversight and education, can help children gain the tools they’ll need to sort fact from fiction online, said Evan Orticio, a Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology and lead author of a paper published today (Thursday, Oct. 10) in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
Orticio argues that, given children’s natural skepticism and early exposure to the internet’s boundless misinformation, it is crucial for adults to teach them practical fact-checking skills. Instead of attempting to completely sanitize their online environment, he said adults should focus on equipping children with tools to critically assess the information they encounter.
“We need to give children experience flexing these skepticism muscles and using these critical thinking skills within this online context in order to set them up for their future, where they’re going to be in these contexts close to 24/7,” Orticio said.
Orticio and his colleagues used a pair of experiments involving 122 children ages 4 to 7 to test how their level of skepticism changed in different online environments.
The first study exposed them to an e-book with varying degrees of true and false statements about animals. Next to a picture of a zebra, for example, some children were shown truths, like that zebras had black and white stripes. Others were shown falsehoods about zebras being red and green. Based on that information, they indicated whether the claims were true or false. A second study simulated search engine results and posed similar animal facts and fictions.
Next, children evaluated the veracity of a new claim within that same digital context, this time about an alien species called Zorpies. On a screen were images of 20 so-called Zorpies. One of the alien’s faces showed that it had three eyes; the rest of the Zorpies wore dark sunglasses that obscured their eyes.
Children were then asked to decide whether all Zorpies had three eyes. But before making their final decision, participants were allowed to fact-check the claim by tapping any number of the aliens, removing their sunglasses and revealing their eyes. Since children knew nothing about the aliens, their skepticism could only come from their assessment of how reliable this digital platform was.
