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The Global Media and Information Literacy Week is a UNESCO initiative that takes place between 24-31 October 2023. Celebrated since 2011, the week is a major occasion for mobilizing worldwide stakeholders to raise awareness in order to increase national take-up and celebrate the progress achieved towards Media and Information Literacy for All.
In connection with the 2023 theme “ Media and Information Literacy in Digital Spaces: A Collective Global Agenda”, SALTO Participation & Information publishes a series of five new resources focusing on common cognitive biases.
“In this series of short articles about our beautiful and flawed brains – more specifically about cognitive biases – we will look at five common cognitive biases that directly connect to media and information literacies (MILs). The foundation of MILs is knowing oneself and others, and what better time to remind ourselves of our biases than at the brink of elections! So hopefully next time we find ourselves in the middle of a heated online debate about political views or simply as targets of political campaigns, we will know better than to let our brains hijack our judgement through these cognitive shifts.”
Maria Murumaa-Mengel (PhD in Media and Communication), Author
The article explores the Just World Hypothesis. It offers insights into the origins of this cognitive bias and how it plays out in our daily digitally enabled realities, as well as how it helps us get through hardships.
This article tackles avoidance and people’s tendency to use it as a coping mechanism to deal with undesired situations. It describes how it was applied in some of the most recent social and political events and why it is relevant for the way we digest information.
In this article, you can read about the frequency illusion. This bias gives people the impression that something is happening more often than is the case, thus making it appear more widespread than it truly is and giving way to magical thinking.
The fourth article addresses a cognitive bias, in which we assign greater value and priority to something, if we have been involved in creating it or devoted enough care and time to it. This article also touches upon the ways the Ikea effect plays out in participatory media.
The last article of the series showcases people’s tendency to assign disproportionate weight to the unimportant and the trivial and ignore or slip over the core of the problems at hand. It describes how bikeshedding can poke its head as a powerful distracting force and separate us from solving burning societal issues.
Discover all the MIL resources published in the Pool
participationpool.euCheck the UNESCO #GlobalMILWeek website
www.unesco.org
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