Speaking of Psychology - How to cope with news overload, with Markus Brauer, PhD, and Don Grant, PhD

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Are you suffering from news overload? Do you find yourself doomscrolling when you should be sleeping, eating, playing with your kids or doing your job? Do you feel hounded by algorithms that keep sending you more bad news? Media psychologist Don Grant, PhD, and Markus Brauer, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin, discuss why it’s so hard to shut off the news spigot and what you can do to cope with media overload while still staying informed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hurricanes, wildfires and floods. School shootings, the pandemic, a youth mental health crisis, inflation and rising interest rates, the war in Ukraine. Some days it seems like all the news is bad. And some days it seems that this media stream of death, doom, and destruction is unavoidable. Are you suffering from news overload? Do you find yourself doom scrolling when you should be sleeping, eating, playing with your kids, or doing your job?

Do you feel hounded by algorithms that keep sending you more bad news not only to your social news feed, but to your email as well? Why is it so hard to shut off the news spigot even when it's only making you feel stressed, depressed, and anxious? Is there anything you can do to control this constant barrage of news yet still be informed? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that explores the connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

I have two guests today to talk about news media overload. Dr. Marcus Brower is Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the Brower Group Lab. Research in his laboratory focuses on group and intergroup processes, including the consequences of belonging to high and low-power groups, and how belonging to in-groups and out-groups affects people. Dr. Brower is also a co-author of a 2021 study that found consuming news about the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with emotional distress, which we will talk about today. Our second guest is Dr. Don Grant, a media psychologist, researcher, and an addictions counselor with expertise in technology's

impact on mental health. He is president of APA's Division 46, the Society for Media Psychology and technology. He is also the national advisor of healthy device management for Newport Healthcare. His research includes investigations into the potential effects of media exposure, social media, cyberbullying, and device-driven attachment bonds on adolescents, teens, and young adults, and our culture at large. Welcome to both of you. Thank you so much, Kim. Thanks for having us. As I said just a moment ago, it feels like we're drowning in news, much of it disturbing, if not downright bad. Is it just my gut saying that there's so much news today that there's much, much more than

there was, say, 10 years ago? Dr. Grant, as a media psychologist, what are your thoughts on this? Certainly, I don't know that there's any more information or news happening. The difference, in my opinion, is how it's delivered because maybe dating myself, but back when I was growing up, we had a television, a radio, and newspapers. Now we have the Internet, and we've got increasingly more platforms. all clamoring to get our attention with sensationalized headlines, again, in my opinion, on the same topic.

My opinion is the inflection point happened in 2008. In 2008, Apple introduced the iPhone, which made the Internet portable. So once we had the news conduit or the information or whatever was, when the Internet went portable, in my opinion, that was when we crossed the event horizon. And now it is always, always available. and we have alerts and notifications and the constant checking. And I'm sure Dr. Barrow can speak about this more. But that's really, I don't think there's more news.

I just think that we've got more accessibility to it. And we've got increasingly more platforms that are just all trying to get our attention to read about it. So let me ask them, what's the impact both psychological and physiological of exposure to so much news and so much of it being negative? Maybe news has always been negative, but it just feels even more so today. Dr. Brower, maybe you could talk about your study findings because I think you looked at some of this. I can. I don't think that it's just there's a impact of more news and that that impact is negative. The news themselves also have changed, right?

Dr. Grant just talked about sensationalism and how the greater competition leads actually to different types of news being reported. So it's not just more. It's also a different kind of information that is being communicated. And I think that's what has the detrimental effects. So let me talk about these detrimental effects. We did that study where we asked people about their news consumption, both on social media, television, and also newspapers. And where do they get their news from and how much time do they spend consulting in these different? So we're not. And then we also measured their emotional distress, self-reported emotional distress. And we found a positive correlation between news consumption and emotional distress.

It wasn't entirely surprising the social media we know with algorithms, those that get more click, have a little more negative news, and people report negative events more, they get shared more often. So all these algorithms sort of contribute to more negative news being shared. on social media. I have to admit that we were a little surprised by the positive relationship between emotional distress and newspaper consumptions. We somehow thought, especially in the early days of COVID-19, we thought that inform newspapers, facts, knowledge about infection, risk, what is, what do we know, what do we not know, what is true, what is not true,

we thought that that would actually reduce emotional distress. Well, we found exactly the opposite. It increased emotional distress. Do you have any idea why? I mean, I was going to ask at some point whether the medium matters, and it would seem to me that reading a newspaper, the imagery is more in your mind. I mean, there are some pictures, but you do have to imagine things as opposed to when you're watching TV or even seeing a video on the Internet.

So what's the difference here? I think there are about five or ten causes that may be responsible for this difference. It's definitely the case that we found the strongest correlation between emotional distress and news consumption on social media. It's definitely true that the weakest correlation was between emotional distress and newspaper consumption. It was the weakest, but it was still positive and it was still statistically significant. The more somebody spent time reading newspaper articles related to COVID-19. the more emotionally distressed they felt. It is interesting to see this relationship,

and we can only wonder what it is due to. I mean, once again, I actually think that even newspaper journalists are subject to that competition that Dr. Grant pointed out before. Nowadays, many of the newspapers, New York Times, have online versions, and here it's the number of clicks, and a journalist that writes articles that generates many clicks will have, their career will advance faster than that of a journalist whose articles have few clicks.

So I think even journalists in news media are subject to the competition and the incentive structure is such to report more negative news and more sensational news. So then let me ask you, Dr. Grant, is some of the blame for this then lies at the feet of reporters or their editors and producers that they're just being goaded into basically producing more sensationalistic and even more negative news? I wouldn't use the word blame necessarily, but I want to take it back. We did a study, which was super interesting. We looked at one news story. We just picked one. And we looked at how news platforms around the world, because we wanted external validity, of course. So we looked at how they promoted and reported this one story,

including the byline, the, you know, the title in the byline. It was fascinating to see the same story. And when you, when it came up in the feeds, how it was the, you know, because it used to be top of the fold, right, in newspapers and whoever had top of the fold and anyone's familiar with that term, it was whatever was on the front page. The front page now is one line, maybe six words, on an internet search or on a feed. So I also want to be fair, and I agree with everything, I think, where we're going. And we can talk about this more, and Dr. Broward obviously has the research. I have to look at that, Dr. Barrow.

That's really fascinating to me. You could see a story in a newspaper or on the news, which we trusted. Now, keeping in mind, there's controversy over the years about who controlled newspapers and media. But let's just remove that. that's a different podcast maybe. We trusted that what we saw was fact check. It was correct.

I did an interview. I was very fortunate. I did an interview for a very prestigious newspaper on Monday, and they sent me fact checks later. But I also want to remind us that as we would maybe that morning read something in a newspaper or hear it on one of the news stations that we trusted, we go to the market and we're standing in line. and there are four or five different, they called them tabloids, maybe it had the same story,

but what we saw on the cover was a very different lensing of it. So it's not like I don't think it's new. I think that it's what Dr. Brower said and what I believe is that everyone, you know, is ambitious. We all want our careers to do well. And I don't know that they're purposely trying. but when you have increasingly more news platforms that are digitally delivered, all try to get your eyes on it and do, as Dr. Barber said, click on it.

You are going to try to do something that is going to be alluring, attractive, and get them to click the same as I live in Los Angeles, and there's certain metropolitan areas that had back in the day two newspapers or more. So in certain urban areas, this is not, you know, a new practice where competing newspapers in the same market, I think probably had discussions about how to have people, you know, look at theirs of the same story. So I don't know that it's blaming. I just think that it's now. You know, we've got, they've got six words, maybe ellipses, ellipsies, when you look at a newsfeater, you Google something to grab your attention

and get you to click on that so you do. So the journalists get the clicks. It's also, and I just, I'll end with this, what Dr. Brewer said, also I think is a new phenomenon as all of these things are with digital, you know, things, this is all precedent setting. I think that before you were buying a newspaper, you were watching a news broadcast, which was inclusive of lots of stories. Now it's individualized and now you have the opportunity to really look at one story. So I don't think back in the day, I'm sure that letters to the editor or how reporters reviewed or how successful they were. I think there's probably a different metric, but Dr. Brower is 100% right. Now you're not clicking on necessarily the LA Times.

You're clicking on one story and that is a reporter. That is one. And we all know that the more clicks, the more likes, the more comments. That is the currency right now of success. Let me ask another question. I'm going to take us in a little bit of a different direction. Are there different reactions to all of this news based on age, gender, or demographic factors? Because my sense is that younger people might be less able to process and cope with a lot of negative news. You might think that older people are inured to it, right? We've seen it. But also, younger people are digital natives who grew up with social media,

and they know this media firehose they've lived with their whole life. Baby boomers may be getting their news still from a physical newspaper, or watching the evening news. So are the physiological and the psychological reactions different, or do we even know at this point? I call this media saturation overload. And because I work with teens, and we all know the prefrontal cortex is not, they're overexposed and underdeveloped. They are not able to process and handle. And they also can sometimes be a little more emotional. But I just want to throw that in because I, what you just said that is I work with teens and listen to this every day. But Dr. Brewer, I'm sorry. I would love to hear your thoughts.

No, you're entirely right. In our study, we did find a small effect of age. We found no effect of gender. We do find a main effect in the sense that younger individuals and female respondents reported higher emotional distress. And once again, I probably should say that was all during the initial weeks of COVID-19. We're not talking about June or July of 2020. We're talking here about March and April of 2020, when nobody knew what was going. on. There was a lot of, were a lot of uncertainties about how even the virus gets transmitted. Remember, we were, we, we used to disinfect our groceries with white, disinfectant wipes before we learned that it was airborne. Anyway, so that was that time, right? So we do find an effect, we find a small effect that that relationship between news consumption and emotional distress is

stronger for younger individuals, as Dr. Grant predicted correctly. So, yes, it seems to be that younger individuals are particularly vulnerable to the negative impact of news consumption. And once again, think of our teenagers. Don't we want our teenagers to, like, read the newspaper, be informed of current events. So we, some of us may even encourage our teenagers to spend more time consuming news. well, by doing that, we may actually increase their emotional distress, at least in uncertain times like the initial weeks of COVID-19. So what's the answer then? I mean, should parents somehow control their children's news consumption? How can they do that?

I think not control, but maybe a company, and I'm sure Dr. Grant has many ideas about that, is be there and actually ask questions, help them sort out. relevant from ill-relevant information. And I want to bring up one point that's something that parents might mention too. We are as human being hardwired to direct our attention to negative events. That is very adaptive. If you have a bear at the side of the hiking trail, you want to react to that very fast. You don't want to have a two-second delay where you then maybe turn your head and see, oh, is that really a bear?

So we are hardwired to immediately direct our attention to negative events, threatening events, fearful events. We even react differently. Our amygdala reacts differently to fearful faces that we are exposed to. So if you now translate that to news information, we will be attracted. We will be interested, intrigued by information. that is negative. People, how many people are dying,

how many people get infected by COVID-19, how we can't do anything about them, how hopeless that all is, how terrible our world is, et cetera. So this might be something that parents could point out our natural tendency to consume information, to read information, to be intrigued by information that is negative.

And then have teenagers help them think about how that attention then actually causes us to read more negative information, to click on articles that report something negative, and the detrimental effect that that might have on mental health. So I think parents, instead of prohibiting or not encouraging their children to consume news, I think they can help and help them interpret and identify what information is relevant and what information is useful, for instance, to reduce infection risk and to help them function in an environment, physical environment where a virus is spreading. And Dr. Grant, you said you work with young people and they're distressed by what they're seeing. How do you advise them? Well, and I also

work with parents and what Dr. Brower was saying also during the pandemic, when we as adults and as practitioners, clinicians. We all were feeling it too, right? We didn't know. But I'm going to throw something out there that might be unpopular. What is more interesting to people? And then I'm going to frame it in a subset of teens, news or gossip? And when you hear a salacious little piece of something and you have social media where also now information, real or not, can be shared and shared and shared, but what are you really interested in? So I'm going to ask and call it back to that proposal I made earlier about even though we saw a news story, when we're standing at the checkout line and we saw some of those tabloids, I didn't necessarily buy them, but I certainly

looked at it. And so that's also when you talk about real nose, when I talk to parents, we talk about fact versus fiction in general. So what Dr. Brer was talking about, I don't know that you know, if you tell a kid, would you rather read the, you know, the gray lady? Would you rather read something from the New York Times or what I hear less? Well, I saw on TikTok. So I don't think if you, even if a parent talks about legitimacy of news and vetted news sources and legitimate news sources, but when you have different platforms, what is a kid really going to be more interested in reading like the LA Times or searching

for it or finding it or learning about it on TikTok, which to them is, you know, that's their news conduit. That's legitimate. So I just want to throw that out there. And again, I'm glad it's a podcast. People might have, no, that's not true. But I work with teens. I listen to them and where they get their news and where they have information. I had a kid who told me, because I also worked with addiction. I had a kid who told me that I was wrong, which that's fine. And this was on a different subject, but he said that he read that marijuana is actually really, really positive and a good thing for teens to sleep and use and relaxation. I said, oh, really, where'd you get that? And he said, Don, you were wrong about this. I said, okay, where'd you get it? And he shows me the website.

Well, it was www.cannabis.org. Well, I had to explain, they might have a reason for that. Exactly. Right, right. So learning how to be discriminating about where you get your news, that's a big, big challenge. So, Dr. Brower, I mentioned in the introduction that you also study prejudice, discrimination, and the consequences of belonging to high and low-powered groups. And you're doing some work now, I believe that looking at how constant media exposure to stories about prejudice and discrimination may affect members of marginalized groups. Can you talk about that and what you're finding? Sure. Together with my graduate student, Naomi Eisenberg, we are currently working on a research project, and we're finding over and over again that people actually underestimate their peers, commitment to diversity, commitment to inclusion, and their peers support for, let's say, their organizations, pro-diversity initiatives. And that has very important consequences because what people believe is that actually that most of their peers are sort of don't care about diversity, don't care about inclusion. And that then influences their own behavior.

It actually on the one hand, it causes them to not talk about these issues with their peers. Why would you talk to your peers if you sort of think that that's not a topic that is interesting for your peers? And it also creates sort of social norms around not taking action and not doing anything about it. So I don't know. We conducted a study with a representative sample of U.S. citizens. I think 90% of the people said that racial diversity benefits the country. We have more than, I think, 50 or 60% who support the Black Lives Matter movement. many, many people state that they're very happy with their local taxes going to programs for schools,

helping children from marginalized backgrounds succeed in schools. Many of them say, yes, I'm fine with my state taxes being devoted to some extent for scholarships for students from marginalized groups who go to college. So what we have is we actually have a majority of people who care about diversity and who want social change, who are aware of systemic forms of injustice. But they also believe that they are the only ones. They believe that the majority of other people don't care about these issues and even or slightly have negative attitudes or whatever.

And that has important consequences both for policy but also for interpersonal behavior. And we're trying to think about a variety of ways how to fix that. and we came up with a number of interventions where we actually correct these misperceptions, and it does seem to have a number of important downstream consequences from people behaving more inclusively, more willing to take action on behalf of diversity and inclusion. And that is a very exciting project because I think it shows once again the media influence and how that has real effects of people's behavior. And in this case, it's diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I wanted to talk for a couple of minutes about the algorithms that I mentioned in the intro that are pushing all kinds of stuff to us, whether we want it or not. Is there anything consumers of news can do to protect themselves? Would it help to browse incognito? Are there some browsers that they claim that they'll protect your privacy? Is that a better way to get your news and maybe to stop the algorithms to keep sending you the same stories and just, I mean, the feeds are endless. Dr. Grant, have you thought about this, looked at that? On a daily basis, let's talk about social media. The more you click on something, even if it's negative, the more it's going to feed you.

The algorithms do work that way, whether it's a contact or someone who you follow. negative news, it is going to give you more and more of that. So in terms of how you control it, well, one of the things I tell parents and kids and my own children is I know that it's a hassle. I know it takes a more another moment, but very often whenever you click on something, it will come up with a pop-up window that says cookies and settings. So, and I live in California, so we have a very cool kind of law here that they cannot sell their information and all of that. But I teach this because it's important to go in for certain platforms or new platforms to go in and change the settings. So it does not do advertising. You can control all of this. I also really encourage

turn off the alerts, turn off the notifications because that little dopamine or cortisol hit that you get depending on what it is, when you hear that alert, go off and then it feeds and then you look at it, then you're down the digital vortex because the clickbait's going to get you. And their goal is to get you. And it's interesting because designers, developers, I've talked to these people, they talk about it openly. Their goal is to get you on the platform or get you in there like a casino and keep you there. And they're used, you know, the variable rewards, the same thing is used in slot machines. They leverage a little flaw in our brains that we will always keep going back. We don't know what we're going to get. And if you

think about a slot machine and you look and this is all tied to the Olympic system, but variable rewards is the slot machine. You'll sit there and you'll pull that arm. You'll pull that arm. You'll pull that arm. Well, and I've talked because I've, you got to admire the stage management of this because I guess this was their job. But when they first came up with how to, to replicate that and hit that little vulnerability, It's the swipe. It's the same action. It's the same. They can't put a lever on a device.

But the closest they could come to that has the same somatic and psychological and response is the swipe. Because you never know what you're going to get. You never know what you're going to get. You never know what you're going to get. It's the slot machine mentality. And then seven hours have gone by. So keeping in mind, and I think it's important for parents and educators and clinicians and all of us to educate how this all works, not just the algorithms, which again, depending on which

platform you talk to, they're all saying, oh yeah, we got ahead of this, we're protecting, we're doing that, but you should know how it works. Understand, as digital immigrants as I am, it's a little harder for me to grasp. My kids, like, they know this. This is part of their nomenclature. They just ignore it. But educating and all of us knowing, okay, so what are the things are using to get us and trick us to keep us in the casino called the digital, whatever it is, knowing how they do that, and then we can make an informed decision because when we were talking about the different kinds of media saturation overload, the other problem is that when we are so blitzkrieged with so much information or so many stories on the same topic or the same story,

studies have evidence that it's very difficult to make an informed decision about your thoughts, about that topic when you're getting so much saturation of stories about it, and you can't really process it. It's too much. And I don't know if Dr. Brer would agree with that, but, you know, just throwing it out there. I agree entirely. I think people are not sufficiently aware of the goal, of the story. social media platforms. The goal is to make users come back. It doesn't have anything to do with

information. They don't want to, I don't know, make people feel good. The goal is to make users come back. And then that's tied to advertisements. So that's tied to income. So that is the goal of these algorithms, right? Right. Because we are the product. Oh, my goodness. Kim, I say this all the time. Oh my goodness, I say, if it's free, you're the product. So, you know, there's no formal diagnosis of news overload, but given that people do behave in ways that are similar, as you described, similar, Dr. Grant, to being addicted. Should we be looking at this as a form of addiction

and maybe exploring the idea of a syndrome, if not a diagnosis? Okay, so in the current DSM, right now, conditions for further study is online gaming disorder. It's a foothold. And I'm very fortunate. And I got to be a part of a paper that was written in response to that with some of my colleagues, Doug Gentile et al. I'm one of the at all, just to be transparent. We responded to that and we're looking for the little mid-DSM, the 5.5. And it didn't get in that. But we're hoping that in the six, I predict it's going to be called something like gaming disorder. And we're, We're hoping it makes it.

But we're not even at the six yet, and we know how long this takes. So when we're looking at the 6.5 or the 7, maybe, I'm watching this closely because the rest of the world and the World Health Organization has classified it. When we looked at the proposed criteria and just listed a bunch of them, we thought to ourselves, very honestly, you know, by the time this thing happens, probably everyone on the planet will hit at least six or eight of the criteria. for what this is. So try to prognosticate what it would really be more about the emotional dysregulation, about any biological, and I know Dr. Brower can speak about this better than me,

any biological, psychological, psychological, because when I look at anything with a client or a kid or adult or a patient or whatever you want to call them, I look at how does it impact? Like when you talk about it is something an addiction or dependency. What I go through, and I do it in this way, I first look and I talk honestly, we go through and we try to identify, is this behavior negatively impacting or influencing biological, psychological, sociological, academic slash career, depending on their age or environmental of your health and of your homeostasis? We look at, is it hitting any of those? If you look at device use in all of those silos, you see how an adult's as well, how it

is negatively impacting, influencing, impeding, intervening on that. So in terms of what do you do about it? Well, I don't know. Other people may have other opinions. I think that if you're not in and out of your device and whatever thing you're searching for or whatever your motivation, if you're not out in about 10 minutes, what do you do in there? After 10 minutes or 15 minutes, what they're seeing is that's when the inflection point happens. especially, and I'm talking really in terms of social media. And when someone posts something, and I talk about this a lot, because I talk a lot about social media, great, I love being able to see my friends, my family.

I was just at my niece's wedding back east. I don't live back east. I knew my family's lives that I don't get to talk to. But what I talk about, and I say this three times in every presentation I do, and I always have, if you are posting anything on social media, and I don't care, what is your real motivation? because my close friends in my closest orbit know what's going on. They knew I was at that wedding. So I don't care why, but if you're posting or you're trying to be a voyeur

or whatever your behavior is on social media, but if you're posting, what is your motivation? What do you need? Everyone outside that inner circle who probably knows what's going on in your life, let's talk about what you really need and why you need the whole digiverse to know or whatever you're posting up there. Why is that important information for you to share? And it's different.

So that's also why I'm questioning. Like, why are you on social media? And I'll end with this, because I just did a presentation on bullying, and my part was cyberbullying. We were talking about just being in the vortex. I was shocked because I would have gotten this wrong. Family feud question, what platform has the most prevalence of cyberbullying? and I would have been wrong.

It's YouTube. And I work with, because what happens is creators put things up there, and then people respond and come at them. And so I, when we were talking about being lost in the vortex, I can't even tell you how many times I've sat with a client who has, their sleep hygiene has been disrupted by YouTube. They've been up all night. And I asked them, quite frankly, okay, can you tell me,

one video, what did you see? It is shocking to be the phenomenon to a one. They can't remember one video and they were up all night. So when you talk about how it impacts those different silos, and again, Dr. Brewer can speak to this much better than me. I just have kitchen table experience of dealing with kids and family for 20 years and through this whole rise of the Internet and all the digital, the portable digital use, but that's what I got.

I don't know. Dr. Brower, what's your opinion here? do you agree? And do we need to have something in the DSM that really flags this as a serious, serious problem? I'm actually interested in what, because I respect, what you would call it. I have no idea, media addiction or some syndrome, but it's going to be tough to do that, partly because it's correlated with so many other things and all the causal directions go in all, all the causal effects go in all directions. So on the one hand, we know, that social media consumption leads to poor mental health, right? Everybody else seems to be having

fun. Everybody else is on these great vacations and I'm not. Terrible fear of missing out. So I'm sorry to interrupt you. I call that compare and despair. Compare and despair. So it leads to poor mental health, but also sometimes social media use are indicators of other clinical problems, right? Loneliness, social awkwardness, inability to connect. No close social support network, etc. So the correlations and relationships with other clinical issues are close, and it's going to be hard to distinguish it from that. So I want to move to something slightly different. Yes, maybe we need a clinical diagnosis, but we could also sort of in the meantime work on making things better.

I think much of it is raising awareness in the public or maybe among our teenagers. So we already talked about how hardwired we are for negative events. We just talked about how these social media platforms feed us information that is negative and that make us come back and what their ultimate goal is. I think also it should be made quite clear that people are very bad at distinguishing distinguishing real news from fake news. And people widely exaggerate, overestimate their ability to do that. We're actually incredibly poor.

And there are hundreds of studies showing exactly that, that what is on there. And even if it's a little video and even if it's people with a white coat standing on the stairs of the Capitol, that does not mean that that is actually official information and has any value. So we are very bad at judging, distinguishing fake news from real news. And finally, I think what we need is a little bit more training, maybe statistical thinking or being able to understand uncertainty. And what it means, like to come back to the study was the initial weeks of COVID-19.

We didn't really know what was going on. But certain pieces of information were more reliable than other. others and we knew more about that. So at this stage, we now think it might be airborne. Okay, that is an uncertain judgment. And then now it's 99% sure that it's airborne and that actually that's how its transmission works and we can stop disinfecting our groceries. Teaching people to sort of read through the lines and what is reliable information

and what is unreliable information. And then maybe the next step is where do you get that information? Maybe social media is not the right place to get that information. Maybe you should be going on the web site if you really want to know about affection risk. And what we currently know, maybe the CDC website is the better. Or every state has a health department. And they're now making a real effort to provide information for non-experts, non-scientists, sometimes even for kids, adolescents.

So I think maybe we should teach our, especially our teenagers and friends, we go to different sources for different things. I think we go to social media to watch cute animal videos and they make us feel good. And then that's okay. And then if we want to know what the infection risk is and how I can minimize that and actually whether I should go to my grandfather's 85th birthday in the time of COVID, I think the CDC website might be the better source than social media. I agree with that. You know, I teach healthy device management in the practice of good digital citizenship. If you look at the reason

why ostensibly we even seek out news sources, it's to get information that we don't have or we don't know and to learn. As humans, I fear that what I'm seeing and what I believe in our psychology and our fear-based belief system, we tend to believe people who say things that align with what we feel. We're not really as interested in learning from the other side. So right now, you can find anything, something that aligns with your belief system,

whether it's whatever, but you can find people, and I love that Dr. Barr said, the white coat. Anyone can put on a white coat. and we're used to believing what they say. But I think that we are so used to, we will follow, and I mean that in both ways, both in terms of the definition that it was traditional

and also now with social media, we'll follow people who kind of say things that make sense and aligns with our beliefs. I don't know if we're really interested in learning new things. And the idea that we then can share that, with others and it can just grow and grow and grow and grow and then had a groundswell of suddenly you have these cabals of people sharing misinformation. This is something, again, that's new. And what Dr. Brower said is something I'm very interested in I'm doing right now. Critical thinking.

Critical thinking is something that we are very trained to do. I remember my mentor explaining me when I first was going and pursuing this that Wikipedia is not a citable source. I didn't know. So critical thinking, and I think it's very important that we have policies, just like everything we've added in, just like what's going on now with inclusion and diversity, as we grow and evolve and become more sentient and kinder and more open-minded, I think that it is vital that we do not avoid this and that in the curriculum, starting young, before they even get on devices, I think that critical thinking and device, healthy device management, And good digital citizenship, I think these should be deregure protocol curriculum pieces

because we need to get ahead of it before the kids actually get on the device. And I tell parents, you know, whatever, and I talk about good digital citizenship. And this is, again, with cyberbullying and other trolling things that we've now seen. I tell parents, here's the basic thing that I suggest. Before you let your children have that privilege of that device which you're paying for, sit down with them and discuss what are your family values. of how you treat people, IRL in real life, and that absolutely is the expectation of how it should translate online. But I think that if we don't put this kind of curriculum and educate kids and the

community and parents and what we're doing right now, this is the good use of all this digital media, your show, Kim, this can reach people. I don't know who's going to be listening to this, but maybe they heard something, but I think that this should be deregur protocol of critical thinking, discerning information, where to find sources that are, you know, that are trusted. And this should be a part of school curriculum because this is a part of our kids everyday life. Once we go into virtual reality, augmented reality, mix or whatever, AI, whatever's coming, why don't we have this in the schools? Because they're going to use this probably more than calculus, the kids, because now they don't

need calculus because they can just ask Surrey to solve the problem for them. Well, I'm going to have to thank you both. I think this is fascinating and we could probably go on for another hour and still have new things to say because this is such a hot area. But I want to thank you both for joining me today. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Kim. For our listeners who want to learn more about media overload and psychology's reaction to it, please see the November, December, issue of APA's magazine, The Monitor, which is on our website at www.ap.org slash monitor. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.w.

Speakingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills