Why is that?

Well, uh, this one is, uh, correlational, so we can't speak to what direction it's going, but it's probably lots of different things.

If you have a frustrating situation or experience with the healthcare system, you might conflate that to doctors overall or public health overall, and I think that's an important point, is if you only have intermediate contact with, uh, the healthcare system overall, and maybe that's your doctor or maybe it's your insurance company.

But it's all this big chain of events where basically anyone who's gone to the doctor or had to navigate the healthcare system has probably had a negative experience, and it's hard to separate that negative experience that could be from the insurance company or some administration thing that's completely separate from the actual medical science.

But- When you're navigating it, it kind of feels like it's all connected

So are, are we at a moment, are we at a crisis moment? Like, what, the thing you're studying, how worried are you? What is the definition of the problem you're trying to study and understand?

It's definitely worrisome.

When you look at these trends of trust in institutions, it's declining rapidly in the past decade.

They're not interacting at all.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely an accelerant to this fracturing.

And especially with the mask, it's an identity marker that's visual too.

So it's like there's all these things that kind of accelerate these existing forces.

And I think you touched on a few things there.

One, this connection or lack of connection people have found over time from differing politics or the pandemic or just the way our society is structured does connect to to susceptibility to misinformation because we're isolating ourselves further and further in these communities that agree with us.

And we're not getting that exposure to differing viewpoints or differing connections.

Okay, what do you see going on with AI and this issue of identities and misguided and misinformation?

So I'm just so curious how you feel about that and how know you navigate using that word

yeah it's definitely something i think about a lot and it's been an interesting journey for me personally because i've been studying misinformation for over 10 years at this point and the word originated in psychology literature in like the 80s talking about false memories and stuff very different than how we think about it today So it used to be a very apolitical, academic, technical term, just broadly referring to false or misleading information.

That's still the broad umbrella term, false or misleading information.

But you're right, it definitely has been politicized.

It's been a very polarizing term.

And I do think it has been overused to the point where people do feel very negatively about it.

So how I use the term misinformation, again, I use it as a broad umbrella term referring to academic work, And I also focus on my own work, which is mostly psychological bias.

So, Matthew, the billion dollar question that I get asked all the time and I'm going to now ask you is how do we as science communicators combat misinformation? And then two, I'd be curious if you can help people who aren't science communicators who are in the general public, how can they safeguard themselves against misinformation?

Uh, uh, share a little bit, if you could, about this, the, the research you did into the, uh, affect control theory.

Yeah.

So affect control theory talks more about how we feel towards, uh, cultural ideas and how we think about, um, different components of, of language.

So you mentioned language, so you, yeah, you might find this, this interesting because what we're actually doing is evaluating each- Um, word on three dimensions of meaning, um, like evaluation, potency, and activity.

So evaluation, good, bad.

Potency, strong, weak.

And activity, like really active or more passive and slow.

Why is that now our superordinate identity across all sorts of contexts?

What are some simpler everyday habits that the average person can do to become more resilient to misleading content?

We often talk about media literacy as far as, like, a- the ability to fact-check.

And one term that's often thrown around is this term of lateral reading, which is instead of looking vertically within the article that you see online, you open a tab, look laterally, and say who the author is, who is funding them, what is their background, what could their target audience be? Is the media outlet platforming them? Do they offer corrections? Do they disclose funding? And that could be a guide to seeing how credible this particular source is, as opposed to even diving into the nuances of that article.

Like, maybe that person is writing in a very charismatic, convincing way, but you can look further on what their background is and see that they have a clear conflict of interest.

So that falls into the media literacy bubble that I think can be really helpful.

And then the psychological literacy is another pillar that I have discussed, and that is focused more on our identities and our networks.

And then also, I think another component that can be applied to everyday people, even if they're not scientists, is scientific literacy.

So Matthew, we may feel ashamed when we realize that we've shared something inaccurate, but shame can shut down learning, right? So what are healthier, more compassionate ways for people to correct themselves or others without damaging relationships?

Um, this feels, at least in my lifetime, it feels stronger than ever and I'm wondering if you have any insights as to how did that come about? How did, h- why is that now our superordinate identity a- across all sorts of context?

Yeah, I think there's, uh, a variety of reasons for this.

Um, one thing has just been how, you could talk at, like, the macro level of how political discussion from political leaders has changed, has become much more adversarial in just the p- past few decades.

So you can see this, like, top-down effect of people becoming much more aggressive towards their opponents, um, you know, cons- considering their opponents as the enemy more versus just someone they disagree with.

And we saw that, you know, in the '90s with, like, Newt Gingrich and stuff like that where the language used was just very different.

And so that's, like, at the, the macro level.

But then there's also the personal level, and the environment we are in now is very different than it used to be.

Um, just, but, uh, in these discussions, no matter who you're talking to, if you're talking to someone who seems like an expert, the question is, "Okay, well, what do we do about this? 'Cause it seems like we're, uh, like the train's headed for the cliff." Uh, what options are available according to the research we've done that seems actually has a, can have some positive impact on all of this? Is this just an inevitable outcome of what happens when societies get complex or do we have options here? And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.