Cerasel Cuteanu has joined the Media and Journalism Research Center’s Fellowship Program. Currently immersed in the pursuit of a PhD in Marketing at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, Cuteanu’s research revolves around the intricate web of fake news, a major topic in today’s information age.
Under the umbrella of joint supervision with Saint Paul University in Canada, Cuteanu’s academic journey takes on a transcontinental dimension, exemplifying the interconnected nature of global academia. He has a background in Philosophy, European Studies/Political Sciences, as well as Investigative Journalism. Cuteanu approaches the topic of fake news in a transdisciplinary manner, bringing to his research concepts and ideas from various fields including social psychology, marketing/consumer behavior/theory, communication, political sciences and epistemology.
As part of the MJRC fellowship, Cuteanu will focus on exploring how consumers can react to or resist, in real-time, the influence of fake news messages/communications and analyzing whether that is a better alternative than the post-factum types of reaction, which usually consist of retractions or corrections aimed to debunk fake news.
See below more information about Cerasel’s project conducted as an MJRC fellow.
Cuteanu’s innovative research suggests empowering media consumers to recognize and respond to fake news, applying the same positive skepticism as in evaluating advertisements, rather than focusing on correction methods.
Since experimental studies come to the conclusion that correcting fake news (disinformation, misinformation, and other typologies of fake content) often proves to be inefficient, would there be a way to prevent, in real time, fake news from making an impact by empowering media consumers to activate certain functions/resources/intuitions when consuming an abundant amount of messages in our contemporary Web 2.0 context, thus helping those consumer avoid being affected by malign content?
Cuteanu’s theory is that it could be of help to empower consumers to approach media news, possibly fake news, with the same kind of attention/positive skepticism that is used when being exposed to an advertisement where consumers know that there is persuasion involved and the advertised product may not do all that the ad is saying. In advertising, a reasonable dose of lying is mutually tolerated, yet people exposed to ads understand the rules of marketing and approach ads with a large dose of skepticism.
How can that be used towards the research objective of this project?
By extrapolating from consumer behavior, social learning, and social psychology, this project aims to identify ways to cope with and respond to fake news that enable consumers to debunk fake news without external help, but only using persuasion knowledge and self-control. What can be done to ensure action is taken at the consumer level and by the consumer before consuming disinformation as news? Is there a function/schema (similar to ad schema, or to persuasion knowledge) that consumers could use, as self-forewarning, without needing to appeal to excessive cognitive resources?
Such a function would arguably be a much better alternative than debunking fake news by retraction/correction, which sends us to the unchartered territory of biases and sometimes excessively irrational worldviews. Even if it does not prove to be more efficient than post-consumption methods of debunking fake news, such a function could complement the latter, contributing to more effectively debunking and preventing fake news from making an impact.
Such a ‘function’ would be similar to persuasion knowledge, which, if extrapolated from the Friestad and Wright Persuasion Knowledge Model (1994), could be personal knowledge underlined by people’s experience, possibly not requiring massive cognitive resources. Therefore, it could be a skill that might be taught/instilled at mass level, with significant efficiency, to support citizens in democratic societies to be better equipped to consume fake news (with reduced variance, obviously, depending on the individual self-efficacy).
This set of skills could allow media consumers to avoid correspondence bias by looking at an influence agent’s behavior as situational rather than dispositional. Such skills can be honed by training consumers to ask, when seeing news content, the question they would ask, for example, when being exposed to an ad trying to sell a certain product: “What is going on?”; “Does the source/influence agent approaching me with this news have any ‘ulterior persuasion motive’” (Campbell and Kirmani, 2000). Identifying manipulative intent in news content could motivate consumers to activate such a “mindset” simply because people generally have an “aversion to being unduly manipulated” (Sagarin et al., 2002).
If we test, for comparing reasons, a group of individuals, which are instilled to think this way, would we find them to be more effective in avoiding fake news effects over time than a group of individuals exposed to the alternative methods of correction of/debunking misinformation or disinformation who were not instilled with this type of ‘self-control’?
These research hypotheses will be tested on three different cohorts of people with significant socio-cultural differences: an Eastern European country (Romania), a Western European country (to be determined), and a non-European country (i.e., U.S.A.). The main cohort will have academic background, yet, depending on the data collected in the pilot phase of the project, Cuteanu expects to expand his target population by including individuals with different educational backgrounds.
The project ultimately aims at exploring the possibility of avoiding fake news effects by empowering consumers to do something simple: be constructively aware of possible persuasion schemas (maybe positively skeptical?) when approached by or exposed to various communications/messages/media news (same as consumers do, when approached by ads that try to convey a commercial message); and activate a social learning skill, self-control, in order to avoid being duped by fake content.