Week 1
February 3 to February 11, 2022
Partners: Effy, Faiza, Jacob, Mita, Applied Works
Brief: Design an experience that communicates the importance of fighting misinformation.
First Meeting with Marco
On the first day of our project launch, we sat down with Marco from Applied Works to gather the most important points from the brief. Marco said that much of his work at Applied Works centered on the following words: understand, simplify, enlighten. He encouraged us to dive deep into our research during the first week.
The four points he provided were:
1) understand the content - immerse yourself
2) consider the user
4) iterate the outcome (feedback and iterate)
Decide Which Topic to Focus On
We first had to decide as a group on which aspect of the brief we wanted to focus. The options were:
a) food climate and nutrition
b) vaccines, pharmaceutics and healthcare
c) green economies, green government and legislation.
After some deliberation, we decided to focus on vaccines given the situation of Covid-19 and all the misinformation that we could recall hearing about the virus and vaccines. We also saw that pandemics would be something we would have to continue to reckon with in the future, so it would be a chance to stage our own intervention in terms of a wider healthcare issue, not just the Covid-19 virus.
Literature Review
One of the most important factors for us was gaining a strong understanding of the reasons for misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine. Misinformation can be defined as "unidentified mistakes such as inaccurate photo captions, dates, statistics, translation, or when satire is taken seriously." [1] This is different from disinformation and malinformation, which have a deliberate aim to harm and provide false information.
From our literature review, we found that "there is evidence to suggest that additional, traditional education will not be enough to dispel belief in conspiracy theories. For example, conspiratorial beliefs and inaccurate beliefs about scientific issues such as vaccine safety and climate change have also been linked to certain 'epistemic beliefs,' or broader convictions about how people can and should come to know what is true.
Specifically, people who '[put] more faith in their ability to use intuition to assess factual claims than in their conscious reasoning skills' are particularly likely to support conspiracy theories, whereas people who believe that empirical evidence is needed to validate truth claims exhibit the opposite tendency. (Science Audiences, Misinformation, and Fake News, https://www.pnas.org/content/116/16/7662.long, p. 10)
Debunking Myths about Cognitive Psychology and Human Behavior
We also found that "people can hold conflicting beliefs at the same time and that they might appear to be in one 'tribe' or another depending on how a conversation is framed." [2] Nicky Hawkins, a communications expert who has researched vaccine messaging, says, “The idea that there are fixed groups of people – pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine and a persuadable group in the middle – is a massive oversimplification that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” [2] (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/06/instead-of-debunking-anti-vax-myths-question-time-gave-them-platform)
After our literature review, we collected our findings into a mind map to show the many factors that contribute to misinformation.
Diorama
At the end of the week, Al held a workshop on dioramas. This workshop mainly helped with my conceptual framing. In constructing the dioramas, we had to pick and choose what to edit out and what to keep. I had to seriously consider the main points from the brief and the atmosphere that I wanted to create.
In the end, I chose to depict Bill Gates surrounded by shadowy figures and dystopian images of police and dark glassy eyes. Much of the skepticism around vaccines also has to do with mistrust of government and Big Pharma, so I tried to address this theme as pointedly as possible.
With the bulk of our literature review and conceptual grounding under our belt, it was time to move on to the visualization of our project and how to best address our target group: 15 to 25 year olds who had most likely never heard of Chatham House. Onwards!
References:
[1] Medicine, Media, and Misinformation Series (Part 1)
[2] Sodha, S. (2022) 'Question Time showed that you can’t counter anti-vax myths with cold reason alone'. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/06/instead-of-debunking-anti-vax-myths-question-time-gave-them-platform
Germani F, Biller-Andorno N (2021) The anti-vaccination infodemic on social media: A behavioral analysis. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0247642. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247642
Ève Dubé, Jeremy K. Ward, Pierre Verger, Noni E. MacDonald
Annual Review of Public Health202142:1, 175-191
Amish put faith in God's will and herd immunity over vaccine
update "5.6%" of vaccine recipients in Pfizer trial died according to data released today
Climate Denial: The Long Campaign of Misinformation
December 19, 2017
LaPaz, T.G. Misinformation and distrust: behind Bolivia’s low Covid vaccination rates
Coronavirus (COVID-19) latest insights: Vaccines
9 February 2022
Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news
Dietram A. Scheufele https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9914-5407 scheufele@wisc.edu and Nicole M. Krause scheufele@wisc.eduAuthors Info & Affiliations
January 14, 2019 | 116 (16) 7662-7669 | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805871115
Mian, A. and Khan, S., 2020. Coronavirus: the spread of misinformation. BMC medicine, 18(1), pp.1-2.
Scheufele, D.A. and Krause, N.M., 2019. Science audiences, misinformation, and
fake news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(16), pp.7662-7669.
Southwell, B.G., Thorson, E.A. and Sheble,
L., 2021. Introduction: Misinformation among mass audiences as a focus for inquiry. In Misinformation and mass audiences (pp. 1-12). University of Texas Press.
Americans who primarily get news through social media are least likely to follow COVID-19 coverage, most likely to report seeing made-up news
Types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation
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