Looking Inwards to Battle Misinformation

According to a 2022 poll by the Pew Research Center, Americans across all age groups are losing trust in traditional news media. Anecdotal conversations with students suggest that one of the biggest reasons they and their peers trust news media less is because they consider those media outlets too biased. “Bias” serves as a news literacy boogeyman, whose mere presence in a news story spoils it and renders it untrustworthy. Students enter college well prepared to identify bias in the news stories they read and often immediately move to dismiss those stories as unreliable. However, they, like most news consumers, are less likely to point out and come to terms with their own personal perspectives and biases which shape how they interpret the news.

Self-reflection can be hard for many of us, especially when we use it to examine areas of weakness or gaps in our understanding. However, self-reflection is crucial when engaging with information, especially information that disagrees with one’s pre-existing beliefs. A recent review of studies examining self-reflection identified four categories of “mechanisms of action” which specifically suggests why self-reflection can be a successful strategy in examining one’s own implicit biases: increasing empathy toward others, decreasing automatic associations, increasing awareness of personal bias, and continued practice leading to enduring effects. This can apply to news and media literacy as well. When news consumers identify the narratives and ideologies they cling to, they can take them into account when evaluating news stories which may champion a variety of viewpoints. Self-evaluation does not force news consumers to challenge their beliefs and demand them to change. Rather, it encourages them to build out the context around the news stories with which they engage and open their minds to outside perspectives.

Unlike other pedagogical techniques used to address misinformation, self-reflection by the students puts the onus not on external factors, but rather themselves. By framing self-reflection as a tool students can use to stop the spread of misinformation, it provides students the agency to actively work on limiting the spread of misinformation. It can also give them a sense of responsibility and ownership of the information they consume and share. If all of us who invested in misinformation put as much effort into how we engage with and share information as we do evaluating the quality of the information we consume, we can make significant progress in reducing the spread of misinformation.