Youth and Truth: How young people navigate contentious topics…

Eva Grew is a Research Fellow in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast

The chilled morning feeling. You open your eyes, make your breakfast, coffee, and sit down to read what’s new in the world. Bum! A friend liked your post, great. There is another war somewhere. Election. Scientists informing about the impact of global warming. A cute video featuring a monkey – followed by an ad about the importance of protecting the natural monkey habitat. Suddenly your morning and its calm are gone, and you find yourself on your way to school or work, only to listen to what your friends think about the war, election, and global warming.

Making up your own mind can be difficult when it feels like the flood of new information never stops. We all know that navigating this world of information is hard, particularly when it comes to more complex topics than a recipe for the best banana pancakes (however, even that is debatable!). But living in the constant land of ‘dunno’ can be mentally taxing. Cognitive psychology has a name for this: cognitive dissonance. The feeling of being in two minds about something, lack of clarity, or contrast in our beliefs and actions – like when I think that reducing waste is important, but I also really want my cup of coffee to go. This creates mental stress, something that our minds try to reduce through a variety of strategies.

If you have something to say about young people’s challenges and resources when navigating the complex world of information, then join us on Thursday 7 November for our special event where we will chat about the strategies that young people use (or can use) to navigate the news around them. In particular, we want to discuss how we can look at something from multiple perspectives, and make up our own minds based on educated, rather than biased guesses.

We will have a professor of social science and education, a representative of a platform promoting political engagement among youth, two researchers in cognitive and developmental psychology, and two young people to share their views on what strategies can help young people to make up their minds and avoid becoming overwhelmed. But the true experts in the room will be the audience, who will be invited to share their views on this topic by chatting to other audience members and panelists.

Please join us on Thursday 7 November at 5pm if you have something to say, or even you just want to sit down, listen and gather some ideas on how to wake up with a mind that is ready to take on the world.

You can register by clicking here.

Part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science in Northern Ireland.

QPol is the ‘front door’ for public policy engagement at Queen’s University Belfast, supporting academics and policymakers in sharing evidence-based research and ideas on the major social, cultural and economic challenges facing society regionally, nationally and beyond. Website: qpol.qub.ac.uk  Email:  [email protected]