Reboot in Forbes

As Americans head to the polls for a critical mid-term election, a new Reboot report studying the impact of election misinformation – and how it may undermine confidence in the democratic process – explored what is possible when community engagement is authentic and practiced. Reboot’s research shows that people who are more engaged in their communities and government are better equipped to protect themselves from misinformation and feel more empowered to deal with it. Survey findings from the report, “Misinformed & Misled: Uncertainty, Mistrust and Disinformation Frustrate Voters,” found that engaged citizens were 67 percent more likely to identify election misinformation when compared to those with low community engagement. We defined engaged citizens as those who take steps like attending public meetings, protests and rallies, communicating with government officials, or working with others to solve local problems. 

Large swaths of the population are finding it more difficult to listen to – let alone seek out – someone who does not agree with them. The ability of citizens and leaders to compromise and find common ground has always been central to a robust and thriving democracy. That requires listening to and engaging with ideas one might not understand or agree with. This is a central tenet of critical thinking: The ability to expand your perspective by looking at problems in different ways, from different vantage points. This is particularly important when working with others. Urban Rural Action is to helping to bridge political chasms by helping people see other points of view through dialogue and the building of media literacy and critical thinking skills.

This summer, the Reboot Foundation surveyed more than 500 Americans and explored the intersection of conspiracies, science knowledge, critical thinking and media literacy. The survey found that about 25 percent of participants were open to believing at least one of the conspiracy theories we tested. People who rely heavily on social media for their information were more likely to believe. The survey also probed the participants’ exposure to media literacy principles in school, and found that people who had some media literacy education were 26 percent less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Other research backs this up. Simply, news-literacy gives people a fighting chance against conspiracy believers.

A new Reboot paper, Teaching Critical Thinking in K-12: When There’s A Will But Not Always A Way, examines the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and found that the teaching of critical thinking skills is inconsistent across states and tends to drop as students get older. While 86 percent of 4th grade teachers said they put “quite a bit” or “a lot of emphasis” on deductive reasoning, that figure fell to only 39 percent of teachers in 8th grade. Deductive reasoning is one of the key skills in critical thinking, as it requires students to take a logical approach to turning general ideas into specific conclusions.

A new EU law tightens content moderation requirements on major social media platforms. Large-scale social media platforms will be required to develop concrete plans to remove illegal content from their platforms. Platforms will also have to publicize details about the algorithms that recommend content to users, as well as giving them the option to opt out of these recommendation systems entirely. All of these ideas are steps in the right direction to lessening the addictive nature of social media and its harmful impacts on our mental health. 

The mischaracterization of nuanced problems as black-and-white issues is one of the many tragedies of our highly polarized society. Knowing how to think through trade-offs when decision making is a skill everyone should master.