Presented at LILAC 2022

1. A Wolf in
Sheep’s
Clothing:
Genre Confusion
and
Disinformation
JOEL M BURKHOLDER, JMB7609@PSU.EDU, @FROMTHESHELVES
KAT PHILLIPS, KEC5013@PSU.EDU, @724PHILLIPSK
PENN STATE UNIVERSITY, PENNSYLVANIA, UNITED STATES

2. Objectives
Participants will:
• Explain disinformation as social acts, created by political actors, that borrow rhetorical techniques
from authoritative genres to appear credible
• Identify how heuristics influence the way individuals in general, and themselves in particular, make
decisions
• Employ IF I APPLY, a tool for information evaluation that helps identify implicit and explicit biases
in a text, to interrupt habitual thinking

3. Activity
1:
Is this
news?

5. https://repository.ifla.org/handle/123456789/167

6. https://www.iste.org/explore/Digital-and-media-literacy/Today%27s-news%3A-Real-o

7. https://guides.library.harvard.edu/fake

8. Genre
Confusion
The strategic borrowing of conventions
associated with authoritative genres to
increase perceptions of authority and
credibility

9. The Rhetorical Situation

10. Question
What other examples beyond fake news engage
in genre confusion?

11. Techno Ethos

12. Techno Ethos

13. Academic Ethos
Process Evidence Credentials Language

14. Heuristics
Strategies that “reduce the complex tasks of
assessing probabilities and predicting values
to simpler judgmental operations” (Tversky
& Kahneman, 1974, p. 1124).

15. Content

16. Structure

17. Quite
Simply

18. Hijacking
Heuristics
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stignygaard/18858761288

19. Lack of
Metacognition
• Emotions
• Overconfidence
• Echo chambers

20. Reflection

21. IF I APPLY
ADDRESS COGNITIVE BIAS
Identify emotions
Find unbiased sources
Intellectual courage to seek other
authoritative voices
ASSESS THE SOURCE
Authority
Purpose/Point of View
Publisher
List of sources
Year of publication
#IFIAPP

22. Activity 2
How could cognitive or confirmation biases
factor into the selection and evaluation of this
source?
If someone were to read this and perceive it as
true, how did this source achieve its purpose?

23. Joel Burkholder
Reference &
Instruction Librarian
Penn State University
Email:
jmb7609@psu.edu
Twitter:
@FromtheShelves
Kat Phillips
Nursing & Allied
Health Librarian
Penn State University
Email:
kec5013@psu.edu
Twitter: @724PhillipsK

24. Questions?
Joel Burkholder, jmb7609@psu.edu, @FromtheShelves
Kat Phillips, kec5013@psu.edu, @724PhillipsK

25. References
Ali, K. & Zain-ul-abdin, K. (2021) Post-truth propaganda: heuristic processing of political fake news on Facebook during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 49(1). 109-128. DOI:
10.1080/00909882.2020.1847311
Anson, I. (2018). Partisanship, Political knowledge, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Political Psychology, 39(5). 1173-1192. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12490
Graves, L. (2021). Lessons from an extraordinary year : four heuristics for studying mediated misinformation in 2020 and beyond. In H. Tumbler & S. Waisbord (Eds.), The Routledge companion to media disinformation and populism.
Routledge.
Horne, Benjamin D., and Sibel Adali. “This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News.” ArXiv:1703.09398 [Cs], March 28, 2017.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.09398.
IF I APPLY Guide: https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/IFIAPPLY
Klein, A. (2012). Slipping Racism into the Mainstream: A Theory of Information Laundering. Communication Theory, 22(4). 427-448. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2012.01415.x
Kreiss, D. (2018). In P. J. Boczkowski & Z. Papacharissi (Eds.), Trump and the media. MIT Press.
Lazer, D. M. J., Baum, M. A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A. J., Greenhill, K. M., Menczer, F., Nyhan, B., Pennycook, G., Rothschild, D., Schudson, M., Sloman, S. A., Sunstein, C. R., Thorson, E. A., Watts, D. J., & Zittrain, J. L. (2018).
The Science of Fake News. Science, 359(6380), 1094–1096. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2998
Pennycock, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021). The Psychology of Fake News. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(5), 388–402. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.02.007
Phillips, Kathleen, Roles, Eryn, and Sabrina Thomas. (2019). “Navigating the Information Ecosystem: Getting Personal with Source Evaluation, IF I APPLY.”
https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=lib_faculty.
Polletta, F. & Callahan, J. Deep Stories, Nostalgia Narratives, and Fake News: Storytelling in the Trump Era. Politics of Meaning/Meaning of Politics: Cultural Sociology of the 2016 US Presidential Election. Mast, J. L. & Alexander,
J. C. (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillian, 2019. 55-73.
Sample, C., Jensen, M. J., Scott, K., McAlaney, J., Fichpatrick, S., Brockinton, A., & Ormrod, A. (2020). Interdisciplinary Lessons Learned while Researching Fake News. Frontiers in Psychology, 11.
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.537612
Sundar, S. S. (2008). The MAIN Model: A Heuristic Approach to Understanding Technology Effects on Credibility. Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility. Metzger, M. & Flanagin, A. J. (Eds.). The John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 73–100. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262562324.073
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185(4157). 1124-1131. https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyKahneman1974.pdf
Zimdars, M. (2016). Informational Infidelity: What Happens when the “Real” News is Considered “Fake” News, too? Flow. http://www.flowjournal.org/2016/12/informational-infidelity/