Transcript

Kim Mills: Hurricanes, wildfires and floods, school shootings, the pandemic, a youth mental health crisis, inflation and rising interest rates, the war in Ukraine. Some days it seems like all the news is bad, and some days it seems that this media stream of death, doom and destruction is unavoidable.

Are you suffering from news overload? Do you find yourself doomscrolling when you should be sleeping, eating, playing with your kids or doing your job? Do you feel hounded by algorithms that keep sending you more bad news, not only to your social newsfeed, but to your email as well? Why is it so hard to shut off the news spigot even when it's only making you feel stressed, depressed, and anxious? Is there anything you can do to control this constant barrage of news, yet still be informed?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that explores the connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

I have two guests today to talk about news media overload. Dr. Markus Brauer is professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he directs the Brauer Group Lab. Research in his laboratory focuses on group and intergroup processes, including the consequences of belonging to high and low power groups and how belonging to ingroups and outgroups affects people. Dr. Brauer is also a co-author of a 2021 study that found consuming news about the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with emotional distress, which we will talk about today.

Our second guest is Dr. Don Grant, a media psychologist, researcher, and an addictions counselor with expertise in technology's impact on mental health. He is president of APA's Division 46, the Society for Media Psychology and Technology. He is also the National Advisor on Healthy Device Management for Newport Healthcare. His research includes investigations into the potential effects of media exposure, social media, cyberbullying, and device-driven attachment bonds on adolescents, teens, and young adults, and our culture at large.?

Welcome to both of you.

Don Grant, PhD: Thank you so much, Kim.

Markus Brauer, PhD: Thanks for having us.

Mills: As I said just a moment ago, it feels like we're drowning in news, much of it disturbing if not downright bad. Is it just my gut saying that there's so much news today—that there's much, much more than there was say 10 years ago. Dr. Grant, as a media psychologist, what are your thoughts on this?

Grant: Certainly, I don't know that there's any more information or news happening. The difference in my opinion is how it's delivered because maybe dating myself, but back when I was growing up, we had a television, a radio, and newspapers. Now we have the internet and we've got increasingly more platforms all clamoring to get our attention with sensationalized headlines—again, in my opinion—on the same topic.

My opinion is the inflection point happened in 2008. In 2008, Apple introduced the iPhone, which made the internet portable. So once we had the news conduit or the information or whatever was when the internet went portable, in my opinion, that was when we crossed the event horizon and now it is always, always available and we have alerts and notifications and the constant checking, and I'm sure Dr. Brauer can speak about this more. I don't think there's more news. I just think that we've got more accessibility to it and we've got increasingly more platforms that are just all trying to get our attention to read about it.

Mills: So let me ask then, what's the impact, both psychological and physiological, of exposure to so much news and so much of it being negative? Maybe news has always been negative, but it just feels even more so today. Dr. Brauer, maybe you could talk about your study findings because I think you looked at some of this.

Brauer: I can. I don't think that it's just there's an impact of more news and that that impact is negative. The news themselves also have changed. Dr. Grant just talked about sensationalism and how the greater competition leads actually to different types of news being reported. So it's not just more, it's also a different kind of information that is being communicated. And I think that's what has the detrimental effects. So let me talk about these detrimental effects. We did that study where we asked people about their news consumption both on social media, television and also newspapers and where do they get their news from and how much time do they spend consulting these different sources.

And then we also measured their emotional distress, self-reported emotional distress. And we found a positive correlation between news consumption and emotional distress. It wasn't entirely surprising the social media we know with algorithms, those that get more clicks have a little more negative news and people report negative events more, they get shared more often. So all these algorithms contribute to more negative news being shared on social media.

I have to admit that we were a little surprised by the positive relationship between emotional distress and newspaper consumptions. We somehow thought, especially in the early days of COVID-19, we thought that, and from newspapers, facts, knowledge about infection risk, what do we know? What do we not know? What is true, what is not true? We thought that that would actually reduce emotional distress. Well, we found exactly the opposite. It increased emotional distress.

Mills: Do you have any idea why? I mean, I was going to ask at some point whether the medium matters and it would seem to me that reading a newspaper, the imagery is more in your mind. I mean there are some pictures, but you do have to imagine things as opposed to when you're watching TV or even seeing a video on the internet. So what's the difference here?

Brauer: I think there are about five or 10 causes that may be responsible for this difference. It's definitely the case that we found the strongest correlation between emotional distress and news consumption on social media. It's definitely true that the weakest correlation was between emotional distress and newspaper consumption. It was the weakest, but it was still positive and it was still statistically significant. The more somebody spent time reading newspaper articles related to COVID-19, the more emotionally distressed they felt.

It is interesting to see this relationship, and we can only wonder what it is due to. I mean, once again, I actually think that even newspaper journalists are subject to that competition that Dr. Grant pointed out before. Nowadays, many of the newspapers, The New York Times, have online versions and here it's the number of clicks, and a journalist that writes articles that generates many clicks their career will advance faster than that of a journalist whose articles have few clicks. So I think even journalists in news media are subject to the competition and the incentive structure is such to report more negative news and more sensational news.

Mills: So then let me ask you, Dr. Grant, is some of the blame for this then lies at the feet of reporters or their editors and producers that they're just being goaded into basically producing more sensationalistic and even more negative news.

Grant: I wouldn't use the word “blame” necessarily, but I want to take it back—we did a study which was super interesting. We looked at one news story, we just picked one. And we looked at how news platforms around the world, because we wanted external validity of course. So we looked at how they promoted and reported this one story, including the title in the byline. It was fascinating to see the same story. And when it came up in the feeds how it was—because it used to be top of the fold in newspapers and whoever had top of the fold and it was from that term it was whatever was on the front page. The front page now is one line, maybe six words on an internet search or on a feed.

So I also want to be fair, and I agree with everything, I think where we're going, and we can talk about this more, and Dr. Brauer obviously has the research. I have to look at that Dr. Brauer, that's really fascinating to me. You could see a story in a newspaper or on the news which we trusted. Now giving in mind there's controversy over the years about who controlled newspapers and media, but let's just remove that. That's a different podcast maybe. We trusted that what we saw was fact checked. It was correct. I was very fortunate, I did an interview for a very prestigious newspaper on Monday and they sent me fact checks later. But I also want to remind us that as we would maybe that morning read something in a newspaper or hear it on one of the news stations that we trusted, we go to the market and we're standing in line and there are four or five different, they call them tabloids, maybe it had the same story, but what we saw on the cover was a very different lensing of it.

I don't think it's new. I think that it's what Dr. Brauer said and what I believe is that everyone is ambitious. We all want our careers to do well. And I don't know that they're purposely trying, but when you have increasingly more news platforms that are digitally delivered, all try to get your eyes on it and to as Dr. Brauer say, click on it. You are going to try to do something that is going to be alluring attractive and get them to click the same as—I live in Los Angeles and there's certain metropolitan areas that had, back in the day two newspapers or more. So in certain urban areas, this is not a new practice where competing newspapers in the same market I think probably had discussions about how to have people look at theirs of the same story. I don't know that it's blaming, I just think that it's now we've got six words, maybe.

When you look at a news feed, or you Google something to grab your attention and get you to click on that so that the journalists get the clicks. It's also, and I'll end with this. What Dr. Brauer said also I think is a new phenomenon and as all of these things are with digital things. This is all precedent setting. I think that before you were buying a newspaper, you were watching a news broadcast, which was inclusive of lots of stories. Now it's individualized and now you have the opportunity to really look at one story. So I don't think in back in the day, I'm sure that letters to the editor or how reporters were reviewed or how successful they were, I think there's probably a different metric. But Dr. Brauer is 100% right, now you're not clicking on necessarily the LA Times, you're clicking on one story and that is a reporter, that is one. And we all know that the more clicks, the more likes, the more comments that is the currency right now of success.

Mills: Let me ask another question. I'm going to take us in a little bit of a different direction. Are there different reactions to all of this news based on age, gender, or demographic factors? Because my sense is that younger people might be less able to process and cope with a lot of negative news. You might think that older people are—we've seen it. But also younger people are digital natives who grew up with social media and they know this media fire hose, they've lived with it their whole life. Baby boomers may be getting their news still from a physical newspaper or watching the evening news. So are the physiological and the psychological reactions different or do we even know at this point?

Grant: I call this media saturation overload. And because I work with teens and we all know the prefrontal cortex is not—they're overexposed and underdeveloped. They are not able to process and handle. And they also can sometimes be a little more emotional. But I just want to throw that in because what you just said that is, I work with teens and listen to this every day. But Dr. Brauer, I'm sorry, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Brauer: No, you're entirely right. In our study, we did find a small effect of age. We found no effect of gender. We do find a main effect in the sense that younger individuals and female respondents reported higher emotional distress. And once again, I probably should say that was all during the initial weeks of COVID-19. We're not talking about June or July of 2020. We're talking here about March and April of 2020 when nobody knew what was going on. There were a lot of uncertainties about how even the virus gets transmitted. Remember we used to disinfect our groceries with white disinfectant wipes before we learned that it was airborne.

Anyway, so that was that time. So we do find an effect, we find a small effect that relationship between news consumption and emotional distress is stronger for younger individuals as Dr. Grant predicted correctly. So yes, it seems to be that younger individuals are particularly vulnerable to the negative impact of news consumption. And once again, think about our teenagers. Don't we want our teenagers to read the newspaper, be informed of current events? So some of us may even encourage our teenagers to spend more time consuming those. Well by doing that, we may actually increase their emotional distress at least in uncertain times like the initial weeks of COVID-19.

Mills: So what's the answer then? I mean, should parents somehow control their children's news consumption? How can they do that?

Brauer: I think not control, but maybe accompany, and I'm sure Dr. Grant has many ideas about that, is—be there and actually ask questions, help them sort out relevant from irrelevant information. And I want to bring up one point that's something that parents might mention too. We are as human being hardwired to direct our attention to negative events. That is very adaptive. If you have a bear at the side of the hiking trail, you want to react to that very fast. You don't want to have a two second delay where you then maybe turn your head and see, “Oh, is that really a bear?”

So we are hardwired to immediately direct our attention to negative events, threatening events, fearful events. We even react differently. Our amygdala reacts differently to fearful faces that we are exposed to. So if you now translate that to news information, we will be attracted, we will be interested, intrigued by information that is negative, how many people are dying, how many people get infected by COVID-19, how we can't do anything about them, how hopeless that all is, how terrible our world is and et cetera.

So this might be something that parents could point out, our natural tendency to consume information, to read information, to be intrigued by information that is negative, and then have teenagers help them think about how that attention then actually causes us to read more negative information, to click on articles that report something negative and the detrimental effect that that might have on mental health. So I think parents, instead of prohibiting or not encouraging their children to consume news, I think they can help and help them interpret and identify what information is relevant and what information is useful, for instance, to reduce infection risk and to help them function in an environment, physical environment where a virus is spreading.

Mills: And, Dr. Grant, you said you work with young people and they're distressed by what they're seeing. How do you advise them?

Grant: Well, and I also work with parents and what Dr. Brauer was saying also during the pandemic when we as adults and as practitioners, clinicians, we all were feeling it too, we didn't know. But I'm going to throw something out there that might be unpopular. What is more interesting to people? And then I'm going to frame it in a subset of teens, news or gossip. And when you hear a salacious little piece of something and you have social media where also now information real or not can be shared and shared and shared. But what are you really interested in?

So I'm going to ask and call it back to that proposal I made earlier about, even though we saw a news story when we're standing at the checkout line and we saw some of those tabloids, I didn't necessarily buy them, but I certainly looked at it. And so that's also when you talk about real news, when I talk to parents, we talk about fact versus fiction in general.

So what Dr. Brauer was talking about, I don't know that if you tell a kid, “Would you rather read the Gray Lady? Would you rather read something from The New York Times,” or what I hear less, “Well, I saw on TikTok.” Even if a parent talks about legitimacy of news and vetted news sources and legitimate news sources, but when you have different platforms, what is a kid really going to be more interested in, reading the LA Times or searching for it or finding it or learning about it on TikTok, which to them is that's their news conduit. That's legitimate.

So I just want to throw that out there. And again, I'm glad it's a podcast. People might have, “Grant, no, that's not true.” But I work with teens, I listen to them and where they get their news and where they have information. I had a kid who told me—Because I also work with addiction. I had a kid who told me that I was wrong, which that's fine, and this was on a different subject, but he said that he read that marijuana is actually really, really positive and a good thing for teens to sleep and use in relaxation. I said, “Oh really? Where'd you get that?” And he said, “Don, you were wrong about this.” I said, “Okay, where'd you get it?” And he shows me the website. “Well, it was www.cannabis.org.” Well, I had to explain they might have a reason for that.

Mills: Exactly. Right. So learning how to be discriminating about where you get your news, that's a big, big challenge. Dr. Brauer, I mentioned in the introduction that you also study prejudice, discrimination and the consequences of belonging to high and low power groups. And you're doing some work now. I believe that looking at how constant media exposure to stories about prejudice and discrimination may affect members of marginalized groups. Can you talk about that and what you're finding?

Brauer: Sure. Together with my graduate student, Naomi Isenberg, we are currently working on a research project and we're finding over and over again that people actually underestimate their peers’ commitment to diversity, commitment to inclusion and their peer support for let's say their organization's pro diversity initiatives. And that has very important consequences because what people believe is that actually that most of their peers don't care about diversity, don't care about inclusion. And that then influences their own behavior.

Actually, on the one hand, it causes them to not talk about these issues with their peers. Why would you talk to your peers if you think that that's not a topic that is interesting for your peers? And it also creates social norms around not taking action and not doing anything about it. So I don't know, we conducted a study with a representative sample of US citizens. I think 90% of the people said that racial diversity benefits the country. We have more than I think 50 or 60% who support the Black Lives Matter movement. Many, many people state that they're very happy with their local taxes going to programs for schools, helping children from marginalized backgrounds succeed in schools. Many of them say yes, I'm fine with my state taxes being devoted to some extent for scholarships for students from marginalized groups who go to college.

So what we have is we actually have a majority of people who care about diversity and who want social change, who are aware of systemic forms of injustice, but they also believe that they're the only ones. They believe that the majority of other people don't care about these issues and or slightly have negative attitudes or whatever. And that has important consequences both for policy but also for interpersonal behavior. And we are trying to think about a variety of ways how to fix that, and we came up with a number of interventions where we actually correct these misperceptions. And it does seem to have a number of important downstream consequences from people behaving more inclusively, more willing to take action on behalf of diversity and inclusion. And that is a very exciting project because I think it shows once again, the media influence and how that has real effects on people's behavior. And in this case it's diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Mills: I wanted to talk for a couple of minutes about the algorithms that I mentioned in the intro that are pushing all kinds of stuff to us, whether we want it or not. Is there anything consumers of news can do to protect themselves? Would it help to browse Incognito? There some browsers that they claim that they'll protect your privacy. Is that a better way to get your news and maybe to stop the algorithms to keep sending you the same stories, the feeds are endless. Dr. Grant, have you thought about this, looked at that?

Grant: On a daily basis. Let's talk about social media. The more you click on something, even if it's negative, the more it's going to feed you. The algorithms do work that way. Whether it's a contact or someone who you follow in negative news, it is going to give you more and more of that. So in terms of how you control it, well one of the things I tell parents and kids and my own children is I know that it's a hassle. I know it takes another moment, but very often whenever you click on something, it will come up with a popup window that says cookies and settings. And I live in California, so we have a very cool law here that they cannot sell our information and all of that. But I teach this because it's important to go in for certain platforms or new platforms to go in and change the settings so it does not do advertising. You can control all of this.

I also really encourage, turn off the alerts, turn off the notifications because that little dopamine or cortisol hit that you get depending on what it is, when you hear that alert go off and then it feeds and then you look at it, then you're down the digital vortex because the click bait is going to get you. And their goal is to get you. And it's interesting because designers, developers, I've talked to these people, they talk about it openly. Their goal is to get you on the platform or get you in there like a casino and keep you there. And they're use the variable rewards the same thing is used in slot machines. They leverage a little flaw in our brains that we will always keep going back. We don't know what we're going to get.

And if you think about a slot machine and you look, this is all tied to the limbic system, but variable rewards is the slot machine. You'll sit there and you'll pull that arm, you'll pull that arm, you'll pull that arm. Well, and I've talked because you got to admire the stage management of this because I guess this was their job. But when they first came up with how to replicate that and hit that little vulnerability, it's the swipe, it's the same action. They don't put a lever on a device, but the closest they could come to that has the same somatic and psychological and response is the swipe. Because you never know what you're going to get. You never know what you're going to get. You never know what you're going to get. It's the slot machine mentality, and then seven hours have gone by.

So being, keeping in mind, and I think it's important for parents and educators and clinicians and all of us to educate how this all works, not just the algorithms, which again, depending on which platform you talk to, they're all saying, “Oh yeah, we got ahead of this, we're protecting, we're doing that.” But you should know how it works. Understand, as a digital immigrant, as I am, it's a little harder for me to grasp. My kids, they know this, this is part of their nomenclature. They just ignore it.

But educating and all of us knowing, “Okay, so what are the things they're using to get us and trick us to keep us in the casino called the digital whatever it is?” Knowing how they do that and then we can make an informed decision. Because when we were talking about the different kinds of media saturation overload or the other problem is that when we are so blitzkrieged with so much information or so many stories on the same topic or the same story, studies have evidence that it's very difficult to make an informed decision about your thoughts about that topic when you're getting so much saturation of stories about it and you can't really process it. It's too much. And I don't know if Dr. Brauer would agree with that, but just throwing it out there.

Brauer: I agree entirely. I think people are not sufficiently aware of the goal of the social media platforms. The goal is to make users come back. It doesn't have anything to do with information. They don't want to, I don't know, make people feel good. The goal is to make users come back and then that's tied to advertisements. So that's tied to income. So that is the goal of these algorithms, right?

Mills: Right. Because we are the product.

Grant: Oh, my goodness. Can I say–I say this all the time. Oh, my goodness. I say “if it's free, you are the product.”

Mills: There's no formal diagnosis of news overload. But given that people do behave in ways that are similar as you described, similar to Dr. Grant, to being addicted, should we be looking at this as a form of addiction and maybe exploring the idea of a syndrome if not a diagnosis?

Grant: Okay, so in the current DSM right now, conditions for further study, is online gaming disorder. It's a foothold. And I am very fortunate and I got to be a part of a paper that was written in response to that with some of my colleagues, Doug Gentile, et al. I'm one of the et al., just to be transparent, we responded to that and we were looking for the mid DSM, the 5.5 and it didn't get in that. But we're hoping that in the 6, I predict it's going to be called something like gaming disorder and we're hoping it makes it, but we're not even at the 6 yet. And we know how long this takes. So when we're looking at the 6.5 or the 7, maybe I'm watching this closely because the rest of the world and the World Health Organization has classified it. When we looked at the proposed criteria and just listed a bunch of them, we thought to ourselves very honestly, “By the time this thing happens, probably everyone on the planet will hit at least six or eight of the criteria for what this is.”

So try to prognosticate what it would really be more about the emotional dysregulation about any biological, and I know Dr. Brauer can speak about this better than me, any biological, psychological, sociological. Because when I look at anything with a client or a kid or adult or a patient or whatever you want to call them, I look at how does it impact? When you talk about is something in addiction or a dependency, what I go through and I do it in this way, I first look and I talk honestly, we go through and we try to identify, is this behavior negatively impacting or influencing biological, psychological, sociological, academic/career depending on their age or environmental of your health and of your homeostasis.

We look at is it hitting any of those? If you look at device use in all of those silos, you see in adults as well, how it is negatively impacting, influencing, impeding, intervening on that. So in terms of what do you do about it? Well, I don't know. Other people may have other opinions. I think that if you're not in and out of your device and whatever thing you're searching for, whatever your motivation, if you're not out in about 10 minutes, what are you doing there?

After 10 minutes or 15 minutes, what they're seeing is that's when the inflection point happens. Especially, and I'm talking really in terms of social media and when someone posts something, and I talk about this a lot because I talk a lot about social media. Great. I love being able to see my friends, my family. I was just at my niece's wedding back East. I don't live back East. I knew my family's lives that I don't get to talk to. But what I talk about, and I say this three times in every presentation I do and I always have, if you are posting anything on social media, and I don't care—what is your real motivation? Because my close friends and my closest orbit know what's going on. They knew I was at that wedding.

So I don't care why, but if you're posting or you're trying to be a voyeur or whatever your behavior is on social media, but if you're posting, what is your motivation? What do you need? Everyone outside that inner circle who probably knows what's going on in your life, let's talk about what you really need and why you need the whole Digiverse to know or whatever you're posting up there, why is that important information for you to share? And it's different. So that's also why I question why are you on social media? And I'll end with this because I just did a presentation on bullying and my part was cyberbullying. We were talking about just being in the vortex.

I was shocked because I would've gotten this wrong. Family Feud question: What platform has the most prevalence of cyberbullying? And I would've been wrong, it's YouTube. Because what happens is creators put things up there and then people respond and come at them. So when we were talking about being lost in the vortex, I can't even tell you how many times I've sat with a client who their sleep hygiene has been disrupted by YouTube. They've been up all night. And I asked them, quite frankly, “Okay, can you tell me just one video? What did you see?” It is shocking to me the phenomenon – to a one, they can't remember one video and they were up all night. So when you talk about how it impacts those different silos, and again, Dr. Brauer can speak to this much better than me. I just have kitchen table experience of dealing with kids and family for 20 years and through this whole rise of the internet and the portable digital use, but that's what I got. I don't know.

Mills: Dr. Brauer, what's your opinion here? Do you agree and do we need to have something in the DSM that really flags this as a serious problem?

Brauer: I'm actually interested because I respect—what you would call it. I have no idea. Media addiction or some syndrome, but it's going to be tough to do that, partly because it's correlated with so many other things and all the causal effects going all directions. So on the one hand we know that social media consumption leads to poor mental health. Everybody else seems to be having fun. Everybody else is on these great vacations and I'm not terrible fear of missing out. So it does—

Grant: Yeah. I'm sorry to interrupt you. I call that compare and despair.

Brauer: Compare and despair. So it leads to poor mental health, but also sometimes social media use are indicators of other clinical problems, loneliness, social awkwardness, inability to connect, no close social support network, et cetera. So the correlations and relationships with other clinical issues are close and it's going to be hard to distinguish it from that. So I want to move to something slightly different. Yes, maybe we need a clinical diagnosis, but we could also in the meantime work on making things better. I think much of it is raising awareness in the public or maybe among our teenagers.

So we already talked about how hardwired we are for negative events. We just talked about how these social media platforms feed us information that is negative and that make us come back and what their ultimate goal is. I think also it should be made quite clear that people are very bad at distinguishing real news from fake news. And people widely exaggerate, overestimate their ability to do that. We're actually incredibly poor. And they're hundreds of studies showing exactly that what is on there. And even if it's a little video, and even if it's people with a white coat standing on the stairs of the capital, that does not mean that that is actually official information and has any value. So we are very bad at distinguishing fake news from real news.

And finally, I think what we need is a little bit more training, maybe statistical thinking or being able to understand uncertainty and to come back, to the study was the initial weeks of COVID-19, we didn't really know what was going on, but certain pieces of information were more reliable than others and we knew more about that. So at this stage, we now think it might be airborne. Okay. That is an uncertain judgment and then now it's 99% sure that it's airborne and that's how it's mission works and we can stop disinfecting our groceries. Teaching people to read through the lines and what is reliable information and what is unreliable information.

And then maybe the next step is, where do you get that information? Maybe social media is not the right place to get that information. Maybe you should be going on the website, if you really want to know about affection risk and what we currently know, maybe the CDC website is the better or every state has a health department and they're now making a real effort to provide information for non-experts, non-scientists, sometimes even for kids adolescents.

So I think maybe we should teach, especially our teenagers and friends, we go to different sources for different things. I think we go to social media to watch cute animal videos and they make us feel good. And then that's okay. And then if we want to know what the infection risk is and how I can minimize that and actually whether I should go to my grandfather's 85th birthday in the time of COVID, I think the CDC website might be the better source than social media.

Grant: I agree with that. I teach healthy device management in the practice of good digital citizenship. If you look at the reason why ostensibly we even seek out news sources, it's to get information that we don't have or we don't know and to learn. As humans I fear that what I'm seeing and what I believe in our psychology and our fear based belief system, we tend to believe people who say things that align with what we feel. We're not really as interested in learning from the other side. So right now you can find anything, something that aligns with your belief system, whether it's whatever, but you can find people, and I love that Dr. Brauer said the white coat, anyone can put on a white coat and we're used to believing what they say.

But I think that we will follow. And I mean that in both ways. Both in terms of the definition that is traditional. And also now with social media, we'll follow people who say things that make sense and aligns with our beliefs. I don't know if we're really interested in learning new things and the idea that we then can share that with others and it can just grow and grow and grow and grow and then have groundswell of suddenly you have these cabals of people sharing misinformation. This is something again, that's new. And what Dr. Brauer said is something I'm very interested in, I'm doing right now, critical thinking. Critical thinking is something that we are very trained to do. I remember my mentor explained to me when I first was going and pursuing this, that Wikipedia is not a citable source.

I didn't know. So critical thinking. And I think it's very important that we have policies just like everything we've added and just like what's going on now with inclusion and diversity. As we grow and evolve and become more extension and kinder and more open-minded, I think that it is vital that we do not avoid this and that in the curriculum starting young before they even get on devices, I think that critical thinking and healthy device management and good digital citizenship, I think these should be due protocol curriculum pieces because we need to get ahead of it before the kids actually get on the device.

And I tell parents, and I talk about good digital citizenship, and this is again with cyberbullying and other trolling things that we've now seen. I tell parents, here's the basic thing that I suggest, before you let your children have that privilege of that device which you're paying for, sit down with them and discuss what are your family values of how you treat people IRL, in real life. And that absolutely is the expectation of how it should translate online.

But I think that if we don't put this kind of curriculum and educate kids and the community and parents and what we're doing right now, this is the good use of all this digital media. Your show, Kim, this can reach people. I don't know who's going to be listening to this, but maybe they heard something. But I think that this should be due good protocol of critical thinking, discerning information, where to find sources that are trusted. And this should be a part of school curriculum, because this is a part of our kids everyday life. It's when once we go into virtual reality, augmented reality make whatever AI, whatever's coming, why don't we have this in the schools? Because they're going to use this probably more than calculus, the kids, because now they don't need calculus because they can just ask Siri to solve the problem for them.

Mills: Well, I'm going to have to thank you both. I think this is fascinating and we could probably go on for another hour and still have new things to say because this is such a hot area. But I want to thank you both for joining me today.

Brauer: Well, thank you.

Grant: Thank you so much, Kim.

Mills: For our listeners who want to learn more about media overload and psychology's reaction to it, please see the November/December issue of APA's magazine, The Monitor, which is on our website at www.apa.org/monitor.?

You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.?

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.