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Constructive Conflict Guide > Civic Knowledge and Skills That We Can Use to Help Ourselves and Our Society More Constructively Handle Intractable Conflict > Stripping Away "Overlay" Problems That Make Conflicts Appear More Intractable Than They Really Are > Resolving Fact-Based Sources of Conflict
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BI Article
Constructively Navigating the World of Media Bias
A look at the forces, including our own cognitive preferences, that produce a biased information environment and thoughts about what to do about it.
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Factual Disputes
Disputes over facts have always been present in technical and environmental conflicts. But the ease in creating "fake facts" has made these kinds of disputes much more common, and difficult to resolve, and it can be very hard for lay people to figure out which "experts" are speaking the truth, and which are not.
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Accurately Communicating Factual Information That People Can Use
Given the amount of disinformation floating around, people tend to distrust "facts," unless they reinforce what they already know, or at least come from a trusted source. Here is information about how to be such a source and how to communicate facts in ways people will understand and believe.
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Resolving Fact-Based Sources of Conflict
Conflicts are often dramatically intensified by contradictory images of key objectively determinable facts. Limiting these disagreements with fact-finding efforts that are broadly seen as trustworthy can do much to defuse the overall conflict.
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Distinguish Factual vs Value Differences
Empirical facts about "what is" are very different from moral or value distinctions about what "should be." Clearly distinguishing between those two is essential for good decision making.
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Issue Analysts
We depend upon issue analysts to help us navigate complexities of modern society in ways that identify workable options for addressing problems and reliably assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each option.
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Technical Experts
Technical Experts investigate the extraordinarily complex challenges facing modern society -- things like climate change, inflationary pressures, or infectious diseases that can be very hard for the general public to see or understand. They help develop solutions to these problems, help non-experts judge the relative risks of different choices, and evaluate the likely results of different policy options.
Colleague Activities
Asking people to "do the research" on fake news stories makes them seem more believable, not less
A new study asked thousands to evaluate the accuracy of news articles --- both real and fake --- by doing some research online. But for many, heading to Google led them farther from the truth, not closer.
Colleague Activities
Detect Fakes
Detect Fakes is research project hosted at Northwestern University by researchers at the Kellogg School of Management to examine how people distinguish truth from fiction in online media, especially as synthetic media becomes more and more realistic.
Colleague Activities
MediaWise Education Resources
MediaWise provides resources to help people identify misinformation through engaging, innovative media literacy education. Their goal is to inspire savvy digital citizens who know that when facts prevail, democracy wins.
News and Opinion
Regulating fact from fiction: Disinformation in political advertising
As a starting point for thinking about the disinformation problem, concrete suggestions from Brookings.
News and Opinion
Flagged Disinformation News, Distilled
News and Opinion
Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore
An important exploration of the nature of truth (and knowable truth) in the contemporary Internet era.
News and Opinion
How to Tackle Truth Decay
Thoughts about what to do about a world in which sources of objective truth have almost completely disappeared.
News and Opinion
Stone of Madness
A provocative essay on the nature of misinformation and strategies for constructively addressing it.
News and Opinion
Why do people believe true things? Ignorance and misperceptions are not puzzling. The challenge is to explain why some people see reality accurately.
A look at the complex psychology underlying the ability to distinguish truth from often more comforting falsehoods.
News and Opinion
The Seven Essential Truths of Digital Media Literacy
Solid proposals for responding to the way in which digital media has worked its way into pretty much every corner of our lives.