AMH is an independent media house free from political ties or outside influence We have four newspapers: The Zimbabwe Independent, a business weekly published every Friday, The Standard, a weekly published every Sunday, and Southern and NewsDay, our daily newspapers Each has an online edition AS humans evolved, we developed certain psychological mechanisms to deal with the information surrounding us
But in the 21st-century media environment, where we are exposed to a growing quantity of messages and information, some of these time-tested tools make us dangerously vulnerable to disinformation Today, messages of persuasion are not just on billboards and commercials, but in a host of non-traditional places like in the memes, images, and content shared online by friends and family When viewing an Oreo commercial, we can feel relatively confident that it wants to persuade us of the cookie’s excellence The goals of today’s disinformation campaigns are more difficult to discern, and the content creators are harder to identify
Few viewers will have any idea of the goal or identity of the creator of a shared meme about COVID-19 vaccines And since this content appears in less traditional locations, we are less alert to its persuasive elements In a recent study, we examined how, in this disorienting information environment, normal information-processing and social psychological mechanisms can be exploited by disinformation campaigns Our report, The psychology of (Dis)Information: A primer on key psychological mechanisms, identifies four key psychological mechanisms that make people vulnerable to persuasion
Initial information processingOur mental processing capacity is limited; we simply cannot deeply attend to all new information we encounter To manage this problem, our brains take mental shortcuts to incorporate new information For example, an Iranian-orchestrated disinformation campaign known as Endless Mayfly took advantage of this mental shortcut by creating a series of websites designed to impersonate legitimate and familiar news organisations like The Guardian and Bloomberg News These look-alike sites were subject to less scrutiny by individual users who saw the familiar logo and assumed that the content was reliable and accurate
Cognitive dissonanceWe feel uncomfortable when confronted with two competing ideas, experiencing what psychologists call cognitive dissonance We are motivated to reduce the dissonance by changing our attitude, ignoring or discounting the contradictory information or increasing the importance of compatible information Source: The Independent
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Source: Theindependent
