The Multiverse of Misinformation, Episode 9 - Combating Misinformation: Psychological and Structural Approaches

CCEP Podcasts - Exploring Policy and Ethics in California

Welcome to the Multiverse of Misinformation, a podcast about misinformation and the way it affects the many facets of our life, produced by the California Center for Ethics and Policy--or “CCEP” --at Cal Poly Pomona and generously supported by the Cal Poly Pomona Special Projects for Improving the Classroom Experience grant program.

This season, we explore the many ways in which misinformation affects our everyday lives through influencing, distorting, or driving the discourse in our society. In the past few years, the idea of misinformation has entered the zeitgeist through the concept of “fake news,” or online conspiracy theories shared by your relatives on Facebook, which is probably what most listeners will think of when they hear the term. However, misinformation is neither a new, nor a specifically online problem. In these episodes, the CCEP student fellows use examples from our own class discussions as well as their own lived experience to illustrate the many ways in which misinformation influences what we think, how we act, and what we believe.

For this year’s topic of misinformation, CCEP hosted a panel on April 11, 2024 titled Combating Misinformation: Psychological and Structural Approaches, with a focus on what kind of concrete actions could be taken by both individuals and institutions in combating the present iterations of misinformation in the digital age. The panelists for this discussion were Tiffany Zhu, a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of California Irvine, specializing in the ethics of artificial intelligence; Ian Anderson, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Psychology at Cal Tech, specializing in the effects of social media on psychology; and Shonn Haren, this year’s CCEP Faculty Fellow and Associate Librarian at the Cal Poly Pomona University Library, where I’ve been studying and teaching about misinformation since 2017.

We ask that if you like what you hear, if you care about these issues, please share our podcast with your friends, family, and colleagues.

Thanks for listening.