MIST Opportunity

How susceptible do you think you are to misinformation? Thanks to researchers at the University of Cambridge, you have an opportunity to test how resilient your media literacy skills are with the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST).  The MIST asks participants to categorize a selection of news headlines as either real or fake.  

As a person who consumes a lot of media, and used to fact check one-on-one communications, documents, and testimony for a living, I was a bit miffed to have scored only 19/20 on the MIST-20. (I'm also a perfectionist, okay?  When you have immigrant parents, you can forget about bringing home a mere A. An A+ is for slackers. So forget Type A—I am Type A++.) When I mentioned my disappointment to a friend, she pointed out that in our current media environment, it is hard to "get it right" 100% of the time, especially since I took the quiz as intended by the study authors: without actually doing any fact-checking. 

My friend was correct. The MIST tests some facets of misinformation susceptibility, but not others. In the study, published in the journal Behavior Research Methods, the authors explain that they were testing for general "veracity discernment," which they consider to be detection accuracy plus response biases (distrust and naivete).  While I recognize the value of this work, I can't help but feel that the MIST is really testing for the confounding variables of how chronically online respondents are and how much they care about politics.

As a person who is both chronically online and a politics fiend, the last two weeks, I had to take a protracted break from social media, the news, and non-work screens of all kinds for my literal health because:  (1) I have a very low baseline for asthenopia (ocular fatigue) and, more importantly (2) I could feel my brain cooking in my skull from all the steam building up between my ears from absorbing too much demoralizing shtuff on the internet and news. (Look, I'm going to try not to cuss in this here newsletter, but I can't make promises that I won't. You got a 'shtuff' out of me today instead of the word I really wanted to use because I currently have enough spoons to be on my very best behavior. I cannot guarantee that I will be as abstemious on a day when there are only sporks left in the drawer.)

Lest ye think that I wasn't thinking about that shtuff because I was taking a break from consuming horrifically devastating, violent, and/or dehumanizing images; hypertension-inducing misanthropic propaganda; and infuriatingly naïve Twitter takes from people who care more about being right than being effective, so I wouldn't doomscroll that shtuff every night before sobbing myself to sleep in the small wee hours, do not worry.  It was all kicking around in my head anyway. Rumination is one mainstay of my brand of sparklebrain.

But!

I did decide to do some positive self-care in the form of making and arranging Falloween decorations. So far, I've made:

(1) a framed poster of a skeleton demonstrating enough flexibility to make me positively avocado pulp with envy,

(Yes, I know there was a cuss word in the poster. I don’t know how to use photoshop to cover the word up, okay? Just pretend it isn’t there)

(2) a floral garland for the banister using a hoard of artificial flowers I've been amassing from Buy Nothing over a period of 4-5 years, and

(3) arranging an accent wall from a collection of décor I've mostly rescued from Buy Nothing, Facebook Marketplace, the curb, and, yes, the sales rack at Michael's and Jo-Ann Fabric.

“Uh, Hype, what does any of this have to do with the MIST-20?” I'm so glad you asked! 

You see, while I was doing the artsy farts, I got into The Zone AKA the "flow" coined by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Being in flow got me fixating on a thought that is pretty much always running in the background.

Have you seen the Matrix movies? Yes? Good. Picture the monochrome phosphorescent computer monitor with the scrolling green text from the franchise. That's my brain. As I'm sure you've deduced from reading this far, there's a lot of noise in there. Now, remember how some of the green Matrix text turns white? That's whatever my current fixation is. And right now, thanks to Cambridge and the MIST, the salty fat that is my attention-generous brain matter has been obsessing over several things, one of which is:

How do we get more adults engaging with media to embrace The Gospel According to Metacognition?

Like I said. There's a lot of noise.

Anyway, back to metacognition, starting with what it is. The term 'metacognition' comes from the developmental psychologist, John Flavell, and means, simply, thinking about thinking. Obviously, the act of metacognition isn't new; humans have been thinking about thinking for millennia. Heck, Aristotle wrote at least two treatises related to the topic. (If you’re a chronic insomniac like me, step aside, sheep. There’s a better way and his ame-nay is ristotle-Ay.) But I'm really thinking about the contributions of two of the most influential developmental psychologists, Piaget and Vygotsky, who each identified metacognition as a cognitive developmental milestone, albeit with two very different theories of how a person comes to develop metacognition (and its important emotional adjunct, self-regulation). These theories have shaped elementary and secondary education, and the pedagogy of teaching K-12 students, especially the 'when' and 'how' of teaching critical thinking skills.  In that context, metacognition means the awareness and ability to consider one's own thought processes as an essential component of evaluating media.

Research by Kahne and Bowyer (2017) has shown that teaching information—bare facts—is necessary, but not sufficient for a person to distinguish truth from misinformation.  Strong media literacy has two more variables in the equation. First, it is necessary to teach people about their own biases and the impulse to lean into confirmation bias. This means they not only need to understand the tendency to seek out and readily accept information that confirms what we believe, but they also need grasp that cognitive dissonance means they are likely to be more critical of information that challenges their biases.  To use a Very Scientific term, learning you might be wrong can be "uncomfy." Being able to identify what you think and how you think about it is metacognition. Sitting with the “uncomfy” is self-regulation.

I said there were two more variables, didn't I? The second missing variable is asking the right questions. Knowing which questions to ask is also metacognition.

Odds are, whether we remember it or not, we did actually learn about metacognition in school—yes, even those of us Children Left Behind^TM by George W. Bush's signature legislative achievement, named on Opposite Day. But like most information that isn't a core memory, without periodic reinforcement, we start to forget it. And before you know it, we're leaning into comfort and away from critical thinking.

So let's Carnegie Hall this beech. (Minced oaths are not cussing!) Let's practice, practice, practice.

This week, let's start with the "who." When engaging with a piece of media—any piece of media—we're going to ask, "Who made this?"

That's it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Determine who the person or entity is. Figure out if they are a trustworthy source about this particular topic. Find out if there's any money involved, either by funding the content or from our engagement with the content.

Articles. Op-eds. Scientific publications. Social media posts. Yes, this goes for t.v., too.

Practice makes progress.

REFERENCES

• Csíkszentmihályi M (1975). Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. Jossey-Bass Publishers. pp. 10–.

• Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906

• Kahne, J., & Bowyer, B. (2017). Educating for democracy in a partisan age: Confronting the challenges of motivated reasoning and misinformation. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1), 3–34. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831216679817

• Lewsey, F. (2023, June 29). The Misinformation Susceptibility Test. University of Cambridge. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/misinformation-susceptibility-test

• Maertens, R., Götz, F.M., Golino, H.F. et al. The Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST): A psychometrically validated measure of news veracity discernment. Behav Res 56, 1863–1899 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02124-2

• Zaretskii, V. K. (November–December 2009). "The Zone of Proximal Development What Vygotsky Did Not Have Time to Write". Journal of Russian and East European Psychology. 47 (6): 70–93. doi:10.2753/RPO1061-0405470604