psychology cognition internet

Critical ignoring

Bas Leenders

24 Jan 2025

critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities

Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens, published in Sage Journals, via Jason Kottke.

The authors describe three types of cognitive strategies for critical ignoring, which should be taught in school:

Self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations (of distracting and low-quality information) by removing them from one’s digital environments;
Lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online;
Do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention (by ignoring them).

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