Project MOVICI

Modeling Epistemic Vigilance and Its Institutions in the Communication of Shared Information on the Internet

About the project

The MoVICI research project aims to better understand the social motivations underlying epistemic vigilance when evaluating information communicated on the Internet and during public debates. In academic literature, it is generally assumed that individuals who incorporate false information into their prior knowledge do so because they are gullible. The main proposed solution to counter this phenomenon is critical thinking education, which involves training individuals to use controlled analytical reasoning to evaluate communicated information.

MoVICI seeks to test an alternative explanatory hypothesis: that individuals accept low-quality information not so much because they are gullible, but because they are not motivated to modify their pre-existing knowledge structures. Referring to social interdependence theory, we argue that the relational context (e.g.: competitive vs. cooperative) in which individuals engage in this evaluation activity serves as an explanatory variable for this motivation.