LAUSR

Pizzagate. Hired protesters at campaign rallies. Massive voter raud. The Bowling Green Massacre. These are just a few of the any instances of misinformation that went viral during or soon fter the 2016 US Presidential campaign and election. Misinormation, urban myths, and conspiracy theories have always xisted, but Lewandowsky et al. (2017) make a compelling rgument that our world has changed, offering a distressing ssessment of the increasing proliferation of misinformation nd so-called fake news. As cognitive psychologists, we feel omewhat ill-equipped to comment on this problem, given that he “post-truth” landscape is molded by complex and dynamic ocio-political trends, which stand in stark contrast to the conrolled laboratory conditions we prefer. Rather than a series of solated falsehoods, we are confronted with a growing ecosysem of misinformation, involving “an alternative epistemology hat does not conform to conventional standards of evidentiary upport” (p. 353). What advice, then, might our field of cognitive sychology have to offer? We agree with the eight interrelated suggestions offered by ewandowsky et al. (2017) to attenuate the post-truth problem, s well as the potential for technocognition to ease impleentation. Of the eight, the majority relate to the skill of ssessing the credibility of sources, such as the suggestions to ffload evaluation to international non-governmental organizaions (NGOs), newspaper editors, or computer algorithms; to isclose affiliations and conflicts; and to train students to recogize trustworthy sources. We would like to see the list expanded ith recommendations mapped to the many other skills required o be information literate. That is, learning to evaluate the credbility of sources is only one of many recommendations from he Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) or information literacy (American Library Association, 2016).