Edelman released their 2021 Trust Barometer, which is an annual global study on the level of trust citizens have in institutions.
The Trust Barometer focuses on trust in governments, corporations, NGOs and the media and Edelman has conducted this study for two decades.
Not surprisingly, the past year was not a good one for institutional trust. Key quote from Edelman:
After a year of unprecedented disaster and turbulence – the Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis, the global outcry over systemic racism and political instability – the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals an epidemic of misinformation and widespread mistrust of societal institutions and leaders around the world.
The Trust Barometer has lots of good information and is well worth reading.
But we were particularly struck by Edelman's concept of "information hygiene" in this year's report.
According to Edelman, "good information hygiene means having regular engagement with news, engagement with differing points of view, verifying that information and not amplifying or spreading misinformation."
They measure information hygiene across 4 dimensions:
- Regular engagement with news: Do they stay informed?
- Engagement with differing points of view: Do they avoid information echo chambers?
- Information verification: Do they avoid assuming something is true simply because it supports their point of view?
- Avoids spreading misinformation: Do they check information veracity before forwarding content to others?
Unfortunately, as their chart below (click to enlarge) shows, only 26% of Americans practice good information hygiene.
We constantly run into examples of bad information hygiene in our work.
It's stunning how often we're presented with information and data that are obviously wrong - and easily proven wrong with minimal fact checking.
The culprit is is almost always bad information hygiene, which often manifests itself in the form of confirmation bias.
Bad information hygiene is obviously a huge societal problem and there are no easy fixes.
Regular readers know we somewhat regularly write about biases and how we try to overcome them in our work. A big part of this is practicing good information hygiene, which we will continue to do.
