INFOTRUST: Promoting Democratic Engagement by Understanding the Dynamics of Information Selection and Processing across High and Low Media-Trust National Contexts

Description du projet

Comprendre le discours public à l’ère numérique

Il est essentiel de comprendre comment les citoyens réagissent à des informations difficiles pour favoriser un engagement politique productif dans les démocraties. Cependant, les recherches existantes sur ce sujet se sont principalement concentrées sur les États-Unis, où la confiance du public dans les médias est faible. Le projet INFOTRUST financé par le programme MSCA vise à combler cette lacune en menant des expériences transnationales en Europe, en Asie et en Amérique du Nord. L’objectif est d’étudier comment les différents niveaux de confiance dans les médias influencent la sélection et le traitement par les gens d’informations discordantes, et d’établir ainsi un cadre théorique plus solide pour comprendre le discours public à l’ère numérique. Le projet explorera la dynamique de la confiance au niveau individuel et contextuel, en utilisant des techniques de suivi du web et des yeux pour des observations précises. Cette approche permettra de générer un ensemble complet de données.

Objectif

To foster productive political engagement in contemporary democracies, it is vital to understand how citizens respond to information that challenges their beliefs. Yet relevant research focuses overwhelmingly on the U.S. where public trust in media is uniquely low. INFOTRUST hypothesizes that a major comparative study of low, medium, and high media-trust nations from N. America, Europe, and Asia will upend settled assumptions and promote a more robust theoretical framework for understanding public discourse in the Internet age. Working at the juncture of political science, communication studies and psychology, it will conduct a series of experiments, engineered for cross-national comparability, in 7-8 representative nations, testing whether and how levels of media trust affect the way people select and process attitude-discrepant information. In a first, moreover, the project will operationalize trust at both individual and contextual levels and explore the interactions between them. Its pathbreaking methodology, which adopts web-tracking and eye-tracking techniques, will yield more precise observations than the literature offers, providing a wealth of data for its own conclusions, and for succeeding researchers to plumb. INFOTRUST will facilitate knowledge transfers among E.U. and non-E.U. researchers concerning politics, media, culture, and methodologies. The project will allow an early-career female researcher to gain crucial experience in administering ambitious, cross-national projects, implementing cutting-edge technologies, and working in the E.U. contexts. Moreover, INFOTRUST will employ an international dissemination plan to engage activists, policy makers, journalists, and citizens in its findings, yielding concrete and practical strategies to promote deliberative engagement. The insights it yields will lead to evidence-based solutions for combating political polarization, echo chambers, and the worrisome erosion of democracy we are witnessing at present.