Inoculation and epistemic competence: training students to handle misinformation

Today’s Politics classroom is on the frontline of a battle against misinformation, disinformation, clickbait and bullshit, and we need to develop a pedagogy that can respond robustly to these challenges. I’m not claiming to have the perfect solution, but have spent the past three years developing some starting points.

The first starting point is the development of students’ epistemic competence. Here I’ve drawn from the work of Sarit Barzilai, Clark Chinn and their colleagues, who have done extensive studies with high school pupils. The key here is to create what they call ‘epistemic unfriendliness’, which sounds scary but is actually pretty reasonable: students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints and to information of varying quality as part of their education. An epistemically friendly environment is one where the information students receive is carefully filtered, neutralised and of reasonable quality. In an epistemically unfriendly environment, students receive a more authentic mixture of information and must develop the epistemic competence to filter it themselves. In such an environment, students learn the skills to evaluate the claims they are shown, beginning with some explicit teaching and then becoming more independent at later stages.

Of course, structured epistemic unfriendliness in the classroom must challenge pre-existing factors such as social media algorithms – by the time they enter university, students may already be crawling backwards out of a TikTok rabbit hole they have entered by clicking on a succession of suggested videos that take them in strange and disturbing directions. (An interest in Warhammer shouldn’t presuppose affinity with Jordan Peterson, but nonetheless generates suggestions of this nature.) Our role as educators is to equip them with light and tools to dig themselves out more efficiently.

My opening gambit is a unit called ‘Critical Thinking for Times of Crisis’, which kicks off our compulsory module ‘Crises of the 21^st Century’ and aims to give students the tools to study the controversial current issues they will encounter on the module. I start by outlining a few more-or-less reliable places to find information, including our university library, and warning of the pitfalls of using ChatGPT as a search engine. I then provide a few pointers on identifying a ‘good’ source in the wild – can the ‘facts’ it states be verified? Can you easily find out who wrote it, or a sensible reason for their anonymity? (For example, some articles on the BBC webpage don’t have reporters’ names attached; political dissidents may use a nom de guerre). Does the source take a political standpoint, and (crucially) is this honestly stated? (This is the key difference between a party political broadcast and a fake ‘BBC’ report on TikTok.)

In the next phase, the students do most of the work. I present them with the same news story as told by two tabloid newspapers with different (and honestly stated) political leanings. I ask them to reflect on two questions: ‘What are the main differences in emphasis?’ and ‘Does one “feel” more true? Do your pre-existing political beliefs feed into this?’. They then discuss these points in small groups and reflect on whether the discussion changed their answers. The purpose is to get them to reflect on how their own political leanings influence what they are inclined to find believable. The aim is not to change their underlying beliefs, but to encourage them to separate these from their evidence-based judgements when presented with new information.

We then play a game called ‘Two Truths and a Lie’, based on what Chinn et al (2020) term ‘Participating in epistemic performance together with others’. I show them three headlines drawn from Full Fact, one of which is untrue and two of which have at least an element of truth. The false story I’ve used so far relates to MPs’ expenses, as this is a perennial issue with emotional resonance for many who are affected by cost of living increases. The idea is that they learn to put aside grievances – partisan or otherwise – and evaluate the evidence. The students work in small groups discussing the stories and trying to reach a consensus on which one is false. Again, they must reflect on how political beliefs fed into their perceptions. The purpose here is to decouple beliefs from perceptions of ‘truth’, accepting that information consistent with one’s beliefs can be false and vice versa.

My other starting point draws from the work of Sander van der Linden and his colleagues on inoculation. The idea here is that false information should be treated as a virus, down to vaccinating people with a small inactive dose to prevent infection. I’ve drawn in particular from the condition in which Lewandowsky and van der Linden (2021 361) ‘forewarned’ participants that ‘politically motivated groups use misleading tactics to try to convince the public that there is a lot of disagreement between scientists [about climate change]’. (I did not go as far as copying the condition where they pointed out specific bits of misinformation, because I wanted the students to do that for themselves.) As such, I talk to students about factors such as affective polarisation and the uses of different rhetorical appeals (e.g. to logic, to emotion and to authority), and am clear that these can feed into misleading tactics around controversial issues such as the ones students will look at later in the module. I then run a classroom exercise where I warn students that there will be some false information in short videos imitating BBC broadcasts. They then watch the videos and I ask them to comment on the truth or falsity of what they’d seen. They identified the false elements (and the significance of the ‘BBC’ style) quickly, suggesting that inoculation-based approaches can work in non-experimental conditions to encourage students to deploy mental fact-checking mechanisms – apply ‘epistemic vigilance’, as Wineberg et al (2016) describe it.

The approaches I use are replicable with adaptations to local context. I’d suggest incorporating them into either a current affairs or academic skills module, close to the beginning as the aim is to help students process information on the controversial topics they will cover throughout their degree. The crucial thing to note is that some students will feel attacked when asked to reflect on their strongly held political beliefs: always be clear that you are not trying to change these or brush them off as intrinsically grounded in misinformation. The purpose is, rather, for students of all political orientations to be able to evaluate the evidence independently of whether their beliefs incline them to agree with any given statement. I’d suggest giving them a mixture of blatant falsehood, partial or biased truth, and demonstrable truth that some won’t like. All examples should be relatively easy to verify – here you can make use of groups such as Full Fact, who check stories in great depth. Your students don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just poke around a bit further than their TikTok queue.

Will you turn every student into a dedicated truth-seeker? Probably not. Some of mine admit that they aren’t going to extensively check every claim they see, because there is not enough time in the day. (The time fact-checking takes, even with dedicated sites available, is a consistent theme when I discuss this with students.) You will, however, equip them with the tools and skills they need to extract themselves from the next rabbit hole with their dignity intact.