Cognitive

Lateral reading is a simple heuristic for online fact-checking: Open multiple tabs in your browser and search the Web to verify the credibility of the information.

Inoculation (also known as prebunking) is a preemptive intervention that boosts people’s resilience to false and misleading information and manipulation online. Inoculation involves exposure to a weakened form of common disinformation and manipulation strategies.

Self-nudging online refers to self-imposed interventions in one’s proximal digital choice architecture aimed at enhancing self-governance and lowering distractions.

The fast-and-frugal decision tree (FFT) ‘Can you trust this information?’ is an example of a simple tool for deciding whether or not to trust a piece of information encountered online. It uses three key questions: (a) ‘Who is behind this information?’ (b) ‘What is the evidence?’ (c) ‘What do other sources say?’

Taking its cue from inoculation and learning from experience, self-reflection helps people see through manipulation strategies that are deployed online. The boost thereby increases people’s autonomy online, where precisely targeted advertisement can be manipulative and subtle.