Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of “critical ignoring”—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which people ignore temptations by removing them from their digital environments; lateral reading, which requires users to vet information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the “do not feed the trolls” heuristic, which advises people to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.

Subject	critical ignoring
Subject	deliberate ignorance
Subject	lateral reading
Subject	online environments
Subject	digital information literacy
Subject	critical thinking
Subject	information management
Genre	Text
Genre	Article

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/gk771kw4093
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/gk771kw4093

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND).

Preferred citation: Kozyreva, A., Wineburg, S., Lewandowsky, S., and Hertwig, R. (2022). Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens . Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/gk771kw4093.

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