Abstract:

A large body of research has been conducted about how the social identities of individuals influence and bias their reasoning about specific pieces of information such as climate change or political policy. The increasing amount of media misinformation that individuals encounter on the Internet in the Digital Age, and the negative effect that result from media misinformation have increased the importance of this research. The current focus on misinformation has led to an increase in media literacy programs in K-12 education and in educational research about how young people reason with information on the Internet. Much of the research that has been conducted on how individuals reason with information has used large-scale quantitative surveys. Few these studies have asked participants to describe their reasoning process themselves. In addition, much of the research that has been conducted on how individuals interact with and make sense of information has focused primarily on political identity and has not examined how other identities, such as those related to ethnicity, culture, and gender influence the reasoning process. In addition, the two major studies in the field of education did not ask their participants to describe their online reasoning processes in their daily lives (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017; McGrew, Breakstone, Ortega, Smith & Wineburg, 2018). This study addresses the gaps in the research literature by asking a group of university students to describe their media informational reasoning process and how they think it is related to their social identities. Semi-structured interviews and three elicitation techniques were used in to gather the data in this study. The elicitation techniques used in this study were a free-listing exercise, a sentence completion exercise, and a think-aloud protocol.

The findings of this study indicate that the identities of the participants drove their media informational reasoning process through their motivated interests. The participants often made judgments about the veracity or accuracy of information on the Internet by identifying bias in media sources and determining truthfulness through a consensus of sources stating similar outcomes. The participants often detailed implicitly trusting sources that mirrored their identity and did not fact-check them. The participants viewed their political identity as being more salient than their ethnic or cultural identities in their media informational reasoning process. More than half of the participants did not perceive themselves as having strong ethnic or cultural attachments. Most of those that did have a strong ethnic or cultural attachment perceived them as having little influence on their media informational reasoning process. An important finding of this study is that the identities of the participants were at the heart of how they reasoned with information online, not just how they came to conclusions about information. An implication for practice of this study is that educational efforts related to media informational reasoning should encourage individuals to thoroughly examine and understand how their multiple identities shape their application of online reasoning rather than just focus on the development of fact-checking skills.

Keywords:

Social identity, media informational reasoning, motivated reasoning.