Project description
Understanding truthful information in the digital age
In today’s digital world, both information and misinformation spread quickly. Online, the pressure to rapidly share opinions often leads to false or misleading statements. However, concerns over reputation and trust still motivate people to communicate truthfully. The ERC-funded COST-X project will study how social costs and incentives influence honest communication, and how digital platforms alter the reputational infrastructure that keeps communication reliable. Combining methods from linguistics, psychology, philosophy and game theory, COST-X will empirically test novel hypotheses about communicative norms and the spread of misinformation online. Its findings will help develop actionable strategies to tackle fake news and improve our understanding of communication in the digital age.
Objective
In our digital era, characterised by easy access to both information and misinformation, understanding the mechanisms that encourage truthful communication is more crucial than ever. Despite the social and ethical importance of these issues, however, we lack a unified framework to systematically investigate the social incentives that motivate speakers to communicate truthfully.
COST-X will inaugurate a novel, interdisciplinary, empirically-minded approach to studying communicative norms. The projects overarching goal is to develop a new methodology, grounded in Costly Signalling Theory, to study how norms and reputation underlie truthful communication, offline and online. Adopting this new lens, COST-X will radically change our understanding of a diversity of phenomena relating to truthfulness: (i) the nature and epistemic function of communicative norms; (ii) deniability and indirectness in speech; (iii) testimonial transmission of knowledge; and (iv) online communication. It will inaugurate a new field of study, digital infrastructure epistemology, which investigates how misinformation spreads by attending to how online platforms alter the reputational infrastructure that motivates speakers to be truthful.
Methodologically, COST-X will bring rigorous analytic thought into dialogue with empirical research. Theoretical assumptions will be tested empirically, and theory-building will profit from interdisciplinary cross-pollination from linguistics, biology, game theory, epistemology, and psychology. It will be of high scientific value to all disciplines investigating, or building on, human communication and its norms. Its findings on online communications will have practical uses, establishing philosophical foundations to better understand and tackle the spread of fake news thus bolstering support for democratic institutions, which rely on a healthy information environment to function properly.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionphilosophyepistemology
- humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguistics
- social sciencespsychology
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Keywords
- Epistemic norms
- Costly Signalling Theory
- Speech act theory
- Epistemology of Testimony
- Epistemology of Digital Media
- Experimental Philosophy
- Philosophy of Language
- Experimental Pragmatics
- Misinformation
- Truthfulness
- Deniability
- Fake News
- Reputation
- Trust and Credibility
- Experimental Psychology
- Media Studies
- Digital Governance
- Online Communication
- Social Epistemology
- Philosophy of Language
- Pragmatics
- Linguistics
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
10124 Torino
Italy