The use of (mis)information, social media, and online platforms to manipulate individuals and groups represents a significant problem for the fact-based civil discourse and communication media and has been growing in recent years. In this project, we are seeking to combine quantitative and computational methods with behavioral science and cognitive psychology to tackle what is considered one of the most challenging and pressing issues for democratic societies worldwide. Particularly, our work will develop a set of new computational methods and software to estimate emotional expression in text data, combining a bag-of-words approach with newly developed network psychometric techniques. Our emotion detection methods for texts will be compared to human responses to text data both in online and in-lab experiments, carried out with and without interventions to decrease belief in and vulnerability to misinformation. We aim to develop and test new intervention tools to decrease the belief in and vulnerability to misinformation in at-risk individuals. The CogAgIn lab will be particularly involved in developing an educational intervention for older adults. The data will come from an in-lab experiment with 60 participants.
