Project description

While historically, the aim of propaganda was to convince citizens of a certain agenda, novel forms of disinformation come with a different goal in mind: To confuse, rather than convince. Or, as former president Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon put it: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”. Although this zone-flooding strategy poses a serious threat to democratic functioning, it currently lacks empirical investigation that maps out its effects on citizens. We conduct a rigorous, pre-registered investigation into the effects of zone-flooding that harnesses state of the art-methods from Signal Detection Theory and metacognition to illuminate pressing questions: Does zone-flooding affect citizens’ ability to distinguish truth from falsehood? Does it affect their insight into the accuracy of this distinction? Does it render citizens more skeptical or more gullible? And are these effects politically symmetrical?

While historically, the aim of propaganda was to convince citizens of a certain agenda, novel forms of disinformation come with a different goal in mind: To confuse, rather than convince. Or, as former president Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon put it: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”. Although this zone-flooding strategy poses a serious threat to democratic functioning, it currently lacks empirical investigation that maps out its effects on citizens. We conduct a rigorous, pre-registered investigation into the effects of zone-flooding that harnesses state of the art-methods from Signal Detection Theory and metacognition.
This project aims at establishing the cognitive effects of zone-flooding by providing the theoretical framework necessary for a conceptualization of confusion together with actual empirical tests. Leveraging state of the art-methods from Signal Detection Theory and metacognition, this research can illuminate several potential effects of zone-flooding within the same theoretical and methodological framework. In so doing, this project will (i) lay the foundation of a reliable and theory-informed psychology of zone-flooding; and (ii) assess the effects of zone-flooding in a robust manner.

Cooperations

• Tobis Rothmund, University of Jena
• Winnifred Louis, University of Queensland, Australia
• Melanie Leidecker-Sandmann, KIT
• Vladimir Bojarskich, University of Jena
• Carolin-Theresa Ziermer, University of Jena