Teaching research integrity in the age of fake news.

The last few years have seen an increase in attention paid to the phenomenon of fake news, or the widespread transmission of dubious information through social media and politicized media channels. Journalists and researchers have evoked the rise of an “infodemic” or an explosion of uncurated information (Gallotti et al., 2020).

 

While the vast majority of fake news seems to be shared by a small minority of users (Guess et al., 2019), the transmission of information via social media only makes sense in the context of the collective responsibility of users. In an age of mass communication, all citizens are involved to some extent in the production and sharing of information. When people share news on Twitter, WhatsApp, or any social media, their actions can have far-reaching consequences in terms of the propagation of accurate or fake news. This situation highlights the need for improved scientific education for all citizens.

In an age of mass communication, all citizens are involved to some extent in the production and sharing of information.

In this context, teaching research integrity should constitute a new basis for improving collective knowledge and the ability to detect and criticize received information. Teaching research integrity should focus on teaching students proper epistemic knowledge and virtues, so that students can, both as future citizens and as future scientists, accept and communicate the most accurate and reliable information.

 

While research integrity might seem to be a concern only for scientists, the virtues and knowledge that students can acquire as potential scientists are most relevant for teaching them how to be better citizens. The basic skills and knowledge that are needed for promoting scientific integrity are arguably as relevant for students who won’t ever conduct scientific research themselves. What we need to teach to students is how to recognize reliable information, how to use this information as carefully as possible, and how to transmit the most accurate and informative summary to other people. These skills are as crucial in daily life as they are for science. If we can teach students how to be better users of social media, then time spent on integrity courses will be time well spent.

What we need to teach to students is how to recognize reliable information, how to use this information as carefully as possible, and how to transmit the most accurate and informative summary to other people.

Research integrity constitutes a very broad domain, and includes such diverse issues as plagiarism, fraud, or the ethical treatment of research participants. Research integrity is currently mostly taught in specific disciplines, such as medicine or psychology, that involve the direct treatment of human subjects. But this view of research integrity is restrictive, and, properly understood, research integrity should constitute a fundamental component of any university education. Research integrity should be understood as including all the virtues and skills that are necessary for fulfilling the proper function of science, that is, the production and transmission of reliable knowledge (Douglas, 2014). Understood this way, we can see why research integrity should be central in any university curriculum.

 

Most of the attitudes learned throughout the scientific process are crucial for ordinary citizens. Most particularly, citizens have to be able to dig through a confusing array of news and have to be able to transmit reliable information. The activity of research review and synthesis, and the activity of honest scientific communication, are thus played out in ordinary life in modern democracies. Therefore we must teach student-citizens to be honest learners and communicators. What we want them to realize is that they have a duty to be the most honest communicators, and this requires learning how to recognize reliable knowledge, which in turn requires understanding what the production of reliable knowledge looks like.

Citizens have to be able to dig through a confusing array of news and have to be able to transmit reliable information.

If we wanted to teach students integrity in the treatment and communication of information, what could a core course in research integrity include? In the first weeks, students should learn the importance of epistemic virtues, such as love of truth and epistemic responsibility. In the next weeks, students should learn some basic cognitive skills and knowledge required to apply these epistemic virtues. This would imply first improving students’ ability to recognize reliable sources, and then giving them some basics for recognizing accurate content. Most importantly, students should learn to apply these skills to the evaluation and transmission of scientific content. This could involve for instance summarizing the main strengths and weaknesses of scientific papers or newspaper articles on scientific research.

 

We will never be in a position of teaching any single student how to be a perfect evaluator of information. Students will still sometimes be (legitimately) lost in the flow of information that they will encounter in daily life. But we should be thinking about students simply as one node in a network of epistemic agents. Improving the average accuracy of each citizen can have large effects, as this reverberates and ultimately leads to large decrease in the transmission of inaccurate news. By teaching students how to be better evaluators of information, we are building a general public that will in the long run improve through collective intelligence.

 

References

Douglas, H. (2014). Scientific Integrity in a Politicized World. In Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. (pp. 253–268).

Gallotti, R., Valle, F., Castaldo, N., Sacco, P., & De Domenico, M. (2020). Assessing the risks of ‘infodemics’ in response to COVID-19 epidemics. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(12), 1285–1293. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00994-6

Guess, A., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. (2019). Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook. Science Advances, 5(1), eaau4586. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586

 

Feature image author – @freepik

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