Catherine Lough – The Telegraph July 2, 2023
Students should be taught how to counter conspiracy theories on the school curriculum, a University of Cambridge scholar has said.
Prof Sander van der Linden, an expert on social psychology, said that one of the solutions to conspiracist thinking could be to “implement this stuff in national education curriculums”.
Speaking about his new book, Foolproof, at the Chalke Valley History Festival in Wiltshire, he added that Finland scored highly on the ability to spot misinformation and that this was “because they are preparing kids, you know teenagers, on how to spot propaganda”.
“I mean, historically, they’ve shared a border with Russia for a long time – so they’re keenly aware of the dangers of propaganda,” he added.
“And I think we would probably be well served by making sure again – not telling our kids and our students what they need to believe, but preparing them to spot the techniques of manipulation from as early on as possible and that will maybe help.”
In 2019, the OECD’s programme for international student assessment study found that teenagers in east Asia were more adept at distinguishing between fact and fiction than their British counterparts.
Overall, the study found that fewer than one in 10 students globally could determine between fact and fiction.
The Finnish government introduced an anti-fake news initiative in its schools from 2014. The country also tops the Media Literacy Index, an index of 41 countries across Europe which measures their vulnerability to fake news.
Prof Van der Linden said that the human brain processed repeated information more quickly than new information, which allowed them to be manipulated into believing fake news.
He said: “If you’ve heard something before, the brain is literally faster at processing that new information and it uses that as a signal for veracity.
“So that works well in a number of ways. But people spreading misinformation can take advantage of that. And that’s true for everyone.”
He said that key elements of conspiracist thinking involved being incoherent or contradictory, that they involved suspicion of others, and the belief that the schemes or conspiracies had “nefarious intent” and would usually involve someone as a “persecuted victim”.
He added that it was important to almost inoculate society against conspiracy theories as one would with a virus, and that the growth of deepfakes and ChatGPT capabilities could amplify the spread of disinformation.
‘Magical thinking a gateway to conspiracy theories’
Prof Van der Linden said that spiritual belief, or “magical thinking”, could serve as a gateway to a conspiracist mindset.
“Other forms of magical thinking are superstition. Things you see on TikTok now with younger people is ‘manifesting’, so the idea that if you think positive thoughts, you’re going to concretely shift things – so maybe I don’t want this person to break up with me,” he said.
“So if I say it a hundred times on TikTok, it’s not going to happen. And you see thousands of kids doing this, and I think partly it’s because the world is in not such a nice place.
“People need a way to feel positive and that’s great. But this kind of magical thinking is a gateway to conspiracy theories.”
Courtesy camo khazi
This is the bind all unlawful authority will eventually find itself in. It must start with a narrative, a list of “good stuff!” it says we’ll all benefit from, but ultimately the lies in that narrative will start to contradict earlier lies as they try to build lie upon lie, and those contradictions begin to unpick all they’ve carefully woven together. In the end the narrative has no more substance in real life than does the plot in a novel.
First they didn’t want kids to think for themselves but now that their plot is unfolding they say kids must start thinking for themselves so they can “stay with the program”. That’s a massive contradiction, perhaps the biggest. And after spending years scorning conspiracy theories that get close to the truth, everyone can see they’re now creating yet one more conspiracy to hide old lies as the truth emerges.
Woke and its daddy the Great Reset are failing and we are now in the contradictory stage of narrative collapse. The total and utter b*ll*cks stage.
Funny how the CONSPIRATORS rolled out the ‘Conspiracy Theory’ idea. DO NOT QUESTION WHAT WE SAY!!!!!!
This is fir the school kids in Finland. A little salty language keeping it real.
Covid 101
^^^^^ And now Jo Lindner is dead and it really didn’t take long..
very skilled how the jewish nations destroyers
turn everyting into the opposite + use innocent
children which dont know of the insidious jewish
snake . conspirationtruth are lies +lies are truth .
no wonder when they have all teachers + politicians
over their masonry in their grip .
this is old jewish bolshevik trik to incite
children + komsomolces politicly against
their own parents , so that the parents had
to watch themself what they even say in
private .
I’m a simple person, can’t fully understand the article, Does it mean that one should accept what media, and government tell the people without doubt. Or does it mean that we should teach youngsters to reason, study, analyze, extrapolate, to freely discus with piers what is being said, and to be allowed to draw ones own conclusions. Funny, it sounds like the America of a not so long ago where students from kindergarten to college where prompted by teachers to question every thing. It is now socially, and politically unacceptable to disagree with the narrative.
Magic is now everywhere Joe a kid I went to school with now calls it self-Josephine, and not only does he believe it, it is expected for every body to accept that magical transformation. Yet simpletons should not believe in magical tales of God, go figure.
Schools really need to teach children how to spot Talmudic psycho teachers pushing a Marxist agenda. Maybe the parents need to do that so children can tell their parents “my teacher is obviously a Jew because she/he is trying to control what I believe.”
Do the kiddie snitches get to wear special hats & uniforms as they did in ‘1984’?