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

Descrizione del progetto

Comprendere il discorso pubblico nell’era digitale

Capire come la cittadinanza risponde alle informazioni che si scontrano con le proprie idee è fondamentale per promuovere un impegno politico produttivo nelle democrazie. Tuttavia, la ricerca esistente su questo tema si è concentrata prevalentemente sugli Stati Uniti, dove la fiducia del pubblico verso gli organi di informazione multimediali è bassa. Il progetto INFOTRUST, finanziato da MSCA, mira a colmare questa lacuna conducendo esperimenti transnazionali in Europa, Asia e Nord America. L’obiettivo è indagare come i diversi livelli di fiducia nei media influenzino la selezione e l’elaborazione di informazioni discordanti con i propri atteggiamenti personali, stabilendo così un quadro teorico più solido per comprendere il discorso pubblico nell’era digitale. Il progetto indagherà le dinamiche della fiducia a livello individuale e contestuale, utilizzando tecniche di tracciamento web e tracciamento oculare per svolgere osservazioni precise. Tale metodo permetterà di generare un set di dati completo.

Obiettivo

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.