Cognitive Science
A Touch of Conspiracy: ‘Denver Airport’ & ‘Finland does not exist’
It seems to me that the general knowledge of conspiracy theories (e.g. to be able to mention at least 3 of them) lately has drastically widened. Whether it’s triggered by the sudden abundance of time to spend on free browsing as millions remained home due to lockdown; or by the evident incapacity of ruling authorities…
Read MoreCognitive scripts in social interaction
In his 2012 book Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, Leonard Mlodinow recounts an experiment based on the memory theories of Frederik Bartlett (among which we find particularly interesting the Theory of Remembering). The experiment is carried in a public library, in the copying machine sector. Every time a visitor would head to the…
Read MoreDe Facto Project Approved for Funding by the European Commission
NTCenter is pleased to announce that a project based on our disinformation and misionformation counteracting methodology has been approved for funding by the EU. We partner with universities and training organisations from Belgium, United Kingdom, Czechia, Slovenia, Italy and Poland. The De Facto project will focus in the next 3 years on research and development…
Read MoreClassification of misinformation and disinformation
When we at NTCenter first started our focused investigation on disinformation and misinformation, the topic consisted mostly of fractured content centered around media and politics. And the debate would rarely go beyound that field. However, one particular thread caught our attention, even though it was also focused on journalism and politics to draw examples from,…
Read MoreEquivalency and Emphasis Frames
Chong and Druckman, in the context of media and communications, claim that framing takes two principal formats – equivalency and emphasis frames. Equivalency frames refer to statements which are logically equivalent, but phrased differently. Thus, the phrasing causes individuals to alter their preferences. With emphasis frames, people make different judgements depending on which aspect of a…
Read MoreMotivated Cognition
Motivated cognition is an important concept in understanding how we perceive the world and why we tend to assign unrealistically high trust to information received by those close to us and whom we hold in high esteem, and members of groups of which we are also part, as opposed to other people and members of…
Read MoreSystemic Causality
Systemic causality (systemic causation), as opposed to direct cause-effect, is not a naturally occuring learning concept, claims Prof. George Lakoff of University of California, Berkeley. The explanation is simple – the brain is unfit for this task because it is unable to observe it. The brain deals fairly well with simplistic cause-efffect relations, e.g. summer…
Read MoreFrames as Thinking Contexts
Frames and framing are one of the key pillars of NTCenter’s conceptual model and practical kits for understanding and designing working solutions to the educational implications of misinformation and disinformation. What are frames We know that people think in contexts which are well defined and which have clear semantic roles, and these thinking contexts are known…
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