Truly one of the greatest tragedies of the 21st century is the wasted potential of the Internet. Over the past couple decades, humans have unparalleled access to, effectively, all the information in the world. And look, we certainly aren’t going to tell you the Internet is all bad: you can get a lot of vital information online… but you can also get some folks out here thinking a shadowy government cabal of lizard people controls hurricanes. As parents raising children in a digital landscape, our first instinct might be to shelter our children from any and all such nonsense. But a recent study from U.C. Berkeley suggests that it might actually be better to let our kids get exposed to misinformation.
The study, which was published in Nature Human Behavior, looked at 122 4 to 7 year olds. The children were first exposed to an e-book with pictures. Some children were given true information: next to a picture of a zebra, for example, they would be told “Zebras have black and white stripes.” Other children, with the same picture of the zebra, were told zebras are green and red. They then indicated whether what they’d read was true or false. A second study effectively repeated this mechanism, but via a simulated search engine result instead of an e-book.
Finally, children were given a new claim via the same digital context (either an e-book or a simulated search engine result) about “Zorpies,” an imaginary alien species. They were presented with a picture of about 20 Zorpies: one was clearly shown with three eyes, but the others wearing sunglasses. Children were presented with the claim “All Zorpies have three eyes,” and were given the opportunity to tap on the aliens with obscured eyes to remove their sunglasses to check.
Researches discovered that the children who were the most thorough about fact-checking (i.e. removing the sunglasses to check) were the ones who saw more false claims about animals earlier in the study. Those who had only been exposed to true information essentially did little to no fact checking. Because kids don’t have any pre-existing knowledge about Zorpies, the idea was that their skepticism (or lack thereof) could only effectively come from the source of the information, not the information itself.
In other words, knowing the misinformation was out there from first-hand experience made the children more incredulous… and in a world where they’ll have to parse reality from fiction, that’s a good thing. Think of it as a kind of B.S. vaccine: a little bit of weak exposure now can serve to help them fight off a more serious outbreak of “fake news” later.
“We need to give children experience flexing these skepticism muscles and using these critical thinking skills within this online context in order to set them up for their future, where they’re going to be in these contexts close to 24/7,” said Evan Orticio, a Ph.D. student and the lead author of the study in a statement.
Of course that doesn’t mean letting your child hoover hours of InfoWars and The National Enquirer without supervision. “Our work suggests that if children have some experience working in controlled, but imperfect, environments where they have experience encountering things that aren’t quite right, and we show them the process for figuring out what is is actually true and not, that will set them up with the expectation to be more vigilant,” Orticio said.
So, yes, of course, we need to monitor the sites and apps our children visit. But it’s unrealistic to assume we can scrub their internet experience of everything we don’t want them to see or encounter, particularly as they get older. Even a carefully monitored internet experience can be chock-full-o-nonsense.
Fortunately, this study suggests, that exposure can, with the right guidance, be educational. Keeping an open dialogue about what our kids are seeing and helping them understand how they can fact-check moving forward may ultimately be better for them than a completely scrubbed and sanitized digital experience.
“Children can adapt their level of skepticism according to the quality of information they’ve seen before in a digital context,” Orticio noted. “They can leverage their expectations of how this digital environment works to make reasonable adjustments to how much they trust or distrust information at face value — even if they know next to nothing about the content itself. … It’s not that we need to enhance skepticism, per se. It’s that we need to give them the ability to use that skepticism to their advantage.”
While Ortioco acknowledges that fact-checking is often harder in real life than it was in their experiment, it’s nevertheless encouraging that we can work with the misinformation our kids are given in order to help them become more media literate as they grow up.
