Factual Foundations: Leveraging Psychological Biases to Build Resilient Knowledge Among Citizens in Digital Democracies

Objective

This project addresses the urgent challenge of how to communicate factual evidence to build citizens’ knowledge resilience, that is, their ability to pay attention to factual evidence, remember it, and apply it to form perceptions and opinions and reject misinformation. Resilient knowledge among citizens is critical for democracy, as it enables them to hold meaningful preferences and hold politicians accountable. Yet, knowledge resilience is under threat from misinformation, media marketization, post-truth populism, and declining trust in traditional evidence, highlighting the urgent need to understand how exposure to factual evidence can build resilient knowledge in the mass public. FACTRES introduces the concept of knowledge resilience and pioneers a new research agenda to investigate when, how, and among whom factual evidence builds resilient knowledge in the mass public. It is not only pioneering in conceptualising knowledge resilience as a core capacity for democratic citizenship; it also breaks important new ground by developing the Psychological Alignment Model. It highlights that factual evidence types which are psychologically aligned with how people process information – such as concrete personal case reports – are vital to enhance the impact of statistical and abstract policy evidence on knowledge resilience and mitigate inequality. Methodologically, FACTRES sets a new standard to test this theoretical framework by developing an ambitious cross-national multi-methods design combining 1) population-based panel survey experiments, 2) laboratory experiments incorporating psychophysiological measures, and 3) computational naturalistic analyses of media content and user engagement. The project provides actionable intelligence on how to communicate factual evidence effectively to build resilient knowledge in the mass public. It thus offers a new insight into strengthening democratic citizenship in an era of rising misinformation and post-truth populism.