A summary of the course Data and (mis)information (). The notes from the lectures as well as the main information of all articles are provided in this summary, including examples that are helpful for the exam.
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Data & (mis)information – Literature
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Data & (mis)information – Literature.....................................................................................................1
Lecture 1 – Introduction.....................................................................................................................1
Week 2 - Framing................................................................................................................................3
Scheufele & Iyengar (2014) – The state of framing research: A call for new directions.................3
Valenzuela et al. (2017) – Behavioural effects of framing on social media users: How conflict,
economic, human interest, and morality frames drive news sharing.............................................6
Week 3 – Misleading data..................................................................................................................8
Chambers (2017) – The Sin of Bias.................................................................................................8
Wicherts et al. (2016) – Degrees of freedom in planning, running, analysing and reporting
psychological studies: A checklist to avoid p-hacking...................................................................11
Week 4 – Dealing with misleading information................................................................................14
Lee (2018) – Fake news, phishing and fraud: a call for research on digital media literacy
education beyond the classroom..................................................................................................14
Lewandowsky et al. (2012) – Misinformation and its correction: continued influence and
successful debiasing.....................................................................................................................16
Week 5 – Misleading data visualizations..........................................................................................20
Cairo (2015) – Graphics lies, misleading visuals: reflections on the challenges and pitfalls of
evidence-driven visual communication........................................................................................21
Beattie & Jones (2002) – The impact of graph slope on rate of change judgments in corporate
reports..........................................................................................................................................22
Week 6 – Conspiracy theories and filter bubbles.............................................................................24
Barkun (2016) – Conspiracy theories as stigmatized knowledge..................................................24
Caplan & Boyd (2016) – Who control the public sphere in an era of algorithms? Mediation,
automation, power.......................................................................................................................26
Lecture 1 – Introduction
1
,Picture: inauguration Trump vs. Obama
Trump said he had many more visitors than Obama, however, Obama had many more
o He was supported by people saying that those photographs were intentionally
framed to minimize the enormous support
Matter of framing: do you take the picture when all people are there
already, or do you take the picture 30mins in advance? This will give you a
completely different kind of information
o Others said: “You’re saying it’s a falsehood. Sean Spicer gave alternative facts”
Alternative facts as falsehoods?
- Facts vs. beliefs (what you believe to be a fact)
- Objective truth (truth verified by abundant evidence, universally accepted) vs. subjective
truth (i.e., beliefs backed up by some evidence, e.g., theories, hypotheses, often competing
with other beliefs alternative facts)
o There are some alternative facts: different descriptions of what could be true.
But: these need some further truth
Examples:
- The world is not flat
- The climate changes due to human interference
- 2+2=4
- Everyone dies at some point
- More than two hours of gaming is bad for your health
Feelings over facts?
Factual truth versus emotional truth (= the information “feels true”)
Example: the Dutch nitrogen (stikstof) issue
- Figure shows that the bulk of is it produced by the farmer section
o However, the farmers stated that the measurements were not right
The figures threatened the farmers people who feel threatened, often
start to protest
Post-truth era: an era in which we think that facts are not that important anymore
Circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than
appeals to emotion and personal belief
o Emotions are more important than facts
“If you can’t agree with each other what is true, then anyone and everyone can do whatever they
want with “the truth””
So: facts matter!!
Misleading information: distinction between…
- Disinformation – resulting from deliberate intention to deceive
o Information that the sender intended to be false
E.g., De Speld (form of satire, which is intended to deceive and makes you
think about the content)
Troll factories intentionally try to deceive us, leading away the intention from
Russia involved in the MH17 crash to the Ukrain instead
Russian troll factory: company sent out many tweets that said Russia
was not involved in the downing of MH17 the days after the crash.
2
, These tweets were made public and it was discovered that they were
all sent by the same troll factory.
- Misinformation – resulting from honest mistakes
o Scientific research is thus hard to interpret that journalists don’t have the right skills,
and they make an honest mistake when spreading wrong information
Week 2 - Framing
Scheufele & Iyengar (2014) – The state of framing research: A call for new
directions
Framing = a dynamic, circumstantially bound process of opinion formation in which the prevailing
modes of presentation in elite rhetoric and new media coverage shape mass opinion
- Refers to communication effects that are not due to differences in what is being
communicated, but how a given piece of information is presented/framed in public discourse
Definitions of framing: equivalence vs. emphasis framing
- Equivalence framing the information presented is informationally equivalent across
different frames
o Framing effects refer to behavioural or attitudinal outcomes that are not due to
differences in what is being communicated, but rather to variations in how (= a mode
of presentation) a given piece of information is being presented (or framed) in a
public discourse
Different modes of presentation for the exact same piece of information
How we interpret information differs dependent on how that information is
contextualized or framed
o What is the context that you give to a certain news story? Examples:
Condoms: 95% safe or 5% risk of failure?
Unox worst: 75% lean or 35% fat?
Roger Federer won 7 out of 10 / lost 3 out of 10 matches? (pos/neg frame)
o “Different presentations of essentially identical decision-making scenarios influence
people’s choices and their evaluation of the various options presented to them”
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1979)
They did a classic experiments where participants had to imagine that a
country is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease
If treatment A was framed positively (200 people will survive), most
people would choose A. Whereas if treatment A was framed
negatively (400 people will die), most people would choose B.
SO: by presenting the exact same information in different ways, people will
make different decisions
o Framing occurs through a cognitive process known as applicability
The effects of particular frames are strengthened or weakened, depending
on how applicable they are to a particular cognitive schema
The mode of presentation of a given piece of information (i.e., the frame)
makes it less or more likely for that information to be processed using a
particular schema
- Emphasis framing the observed framing effects represent differences in opinion that
cannot be attributed exclusively to differences in presentation
o You put emphasis on one particular issue/perspective and make it more salient
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