Misinformation is an epidemic and librarians are the frontline workers.
Education will play a central role in strengthening the mental resilience of current and future generations.
At the core of human adaptation is the solution to the riddle of how a human mind, which was crafted to work with people we know, evolved the instinct to work with people we don’t. But there was a cost, and the result was a seemingly intractable paradox embedded in humanity’s moral compass.
Some psychologists champion what they call ‘positive illusions’, mild misapprehensions about ourselves that are conducive to health and happiness
As a highly social species, humans have an evolved tendency to favor the ‘in-group.’ This trait significantly impacts our immunity, or lack of it, to false or harmful information.
New research suggests there may have been Darwinian mechanisms behind the evolution of witch-hunting phenomena.
Viewing minds through the lens of cognitive immunology can reveal antidotes to misinformation, disinformation, and information chaos.
After initially accepting the metaphor of mental immunity as a useful gift from a cherished friend, my more deeply ingrained worldview now appears to be casting doubts upon it.
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. - John Kenneth Galbraith
Some bad ideas get past a mind’s defenses and then hijack the mind’s immune system. These bad ideas recruit the mind’s defenses to protect themselves, even if that recruitment ends up harming the mind that hosts it.
Models from epidemiology are increasingly used to better understand how misinformation spreads in online networks.
The emerging field of “cognitive immunology” may hold solutions to our world’s growing disinformation problems.