Making critical thinking fun
In a recent review paper, Alan Bensley concludes that “people who endorse unsubstantiated claims less tend to show better critical thinking skills, possess more relevant knowledge, and are more disposed to think critically.” In a study on the relationship between critical thinking and believing conspiracy theories, Anthony Lantian and colleagues find that “conspiracy believers have less developed critical thinking ability.”
This emphasis on critical thinking as a defense against misinformation and the appeal of conspiracy theories won’t surprise teachers of philosophy. We know that critical thinking underscores the capacity to assess and develop arguments, which serves citizens well, whether or not they end up dedicating their lives to philosophy. Navigating information and misinformation, especially in circumstances where there are competing sources and experts disagree, requires the capacity to identify the mechanisms by which misinformation spreads and to understand why some explanations gain more traction than others.
However, not all the knowledge required to develop critical thinking skills is easy or fun to learn. It may be really useful to be able to identify the factors contributing to conspiracy theories, following the latest research in philosophy, psychology, and social science, but learning long lists of fallacies and biases by heart can be overwhelming. There is also a legitimate concern that all that theoretical knowledge may never translate into the practical skills of suspending judgment about a popular theory. To address these issues, online interactive games have been developed to encourage young people to hone their critical thinking skills. One example is Bad News, where students are invited to make up their own fake news so they can become more skilled at spotting other people’s fake news. In Bad News, students are left alone with their screens, and thus the game is better suited to home time than school time. Our aim was to devise an activity that can take place in the classroom, or in an exhibition space, and can be used to kick start reflection and discussion, thereby adding a competitive and social element to the game as a pedagogical tool.
What Fake Plots! is
Fake Plots! can be used to raise awareness of the mechanisms responsible for the generation and spreading of misinformation and conspiracy theories. In Fake Plots! players are encouraged to be creative and think outside the box, interacting with each other in a playful way. The game can inspire guided reflection and discussion and, for these reasons, it is an ideal game to play in the classroom. We tested it with large groups of between twenty and thirty players and it did work well, but minimally three players and one facilitator are needed, so smaller groups can enjoy it too.
Fake Plots! emerged from an idea of Anna Ichino, a philosopher working on conspiracy theories, who created it for an exhibition at the Philosophy Museum in Milan. Anna had some help from Lisa Bortolotti, who is also interested in conspiracy theories and co-authored with Anna a piece for The Conversation where they argue that the cognitive biases and psychological needs explaining the formation of conspiracy theories are not pathological but widespread.
The realization of the game was made possible by computer scientists Diego Tarantola and Paolo Ceravolo who created the dedicated social platform, Glitter, where the game takes place. Glitter can be accessed from a device connected to the internet and resembles Twitter/X: users can post and respond to the posts of other users by liking, commenting, and reposting. The game is available in Italian, English, and Spanish. The English version of the game was developed by Lisa with Nikk Effingham, and the Spanish version with Fer Zambra.
The aim of the game is for players to create conspiracy theories and spread them on Glitter, becoming as popular as possible in that social community by having their posts liked, commented upon, and reposted. To this end, there is a conspiracy theorist’s toolkit (a set of color-coded cards with key information about the “ingredients” of conspiracy theories) that helps players think and act like true conspiracy theorists (see Figure 1).
Here are the three steps to follow to turn into a successful conspiracy theorist:
- Distrust the official explanation of an unusual, significant event. Insinuate doubts about or openly challenge the explanation of the event offered by mainstream sources of information.
- Develop your own conspiracist explanation of the event. Your explanation will be based on intuitive reasoning and satisfy your psychological needs.
- Spread your explanation far and wide. Use argumentative fallacies and communication strategies to protect your theory from challenges and increase its influence.
After players have familiarized themselves with the kit and the three steps, the competitive stage of the game can begin. A breaking news item from a mainstream information channel appears in everyone’s newsfeed. From that moment on, players can post their conspiracy-themed responses to the news item in question and interact with each other. They have ten minutes to play, during which new updates on the initial news item will also appear. Players get points when their posts are interacted with, but also when they interact with other players’ posts. During the ten minutes of play, the activity of each player is monitored by the Glitter algorithm, which assigns popularity points based on the player’s interactions on the platform.
How to play Fake Plots! in the classroom
How can the game be played in the classroom? We had Fake Plots! sessions with secondary school students, undergraduate students, and postgraduate students at the University of Milan and the University of Birmingham in the 2023—2024 academic year, with good results. Minimally, a session lasts forty-five minutes, although this can be extended if the teacher builds more content and references to the literature into the presentation of the kit; if more than one round of the competitive session of the game is played; or if more time can be dedicated to group work and general discussion at the end.
In stage 1 the teacher explains the kit and invites students to spend ten minutes familiarizing themselves with it. At the end, the teacher can test comprehension by using the examples on the cards. For instance: “If I appeal to the authority of a tennis player when I argue against the safety of vaccines, which fallacy am I committing?”
Stage 2 begins with students logging in to Glitter. The teacher starts the ten-minute timer and introduces the first post on Glitter, which appears as a news item from an official source of information. Students engage on the platform for ten minutes, reacting to the news items and the further updates, by posting their own conspiracy explanations and interacting with the other posts (see Figure 3). When the ten minutes are over, the teacher checks the players’ popularity score and declares a winner.
In stage 3, the teacher asks students to convene into small groups and assigns specific tasks to them. Tasks could be: “Respond to another player’s post by using as many cards as you can from the kit”; “Find a post that appeals to an irrelevant authority”; “Create a post which instantiates at least one bias and one fallacy.”
Students work on the tasks in their groups, consulting the kit. At the end of the time allocated to group work, representatives from each group share their answers and there is a general discussion about which posts were most popular and why.
Benefits of the game
The competitive nature of games can motivate people to absorb a lot of information that otherwise might seem dry and abstract. In this case, students can test their newly acquired knowledge of the factors contributing to the spreading of misinformation and conspiracy theories straight away, in a fun and creative way. The bright and playful style of the kit helps too, as biases, needs, and fallacies are presented on color-coded cards, with intuitive icons and easy-to-learn slogans and examples (see Figure 4).
Fake Plots! is inspired by the idea of the so-called “cognitive immunization strategy.” Vaccines inoculate our immune system with a low dose of a virus so that the immune system learns how to react appropriately to the virus when it encounters it in higher doses. Similarly, Fake Plots! inoculates us with a small amount of (harmless, but realistic) misinformation, so that we learn how misinformation works and are then able to recognize and resist it when we encounter it for real.
The game can be embedded in a module for teaching purposes (e.g., to complement a topic such as the psychology of conspiracy theories or the relationship between evidence and truth) and can be played either in-person or online, and either in a one-off session or as in a series of sessions. The main difference between the latter uses concerns the way in which students interact with the kit. The kit can be something that students consult for a few minutes before playing the timed, competitive stage of the game, and then again rely on to complete some debriefing tasks afterwards. Alternatively, it can be introduced in a gradual way as part of the theoretical background of the module contents over a series of classes, either before or after the game is first proposed. In any case, the kit is a learning resource that can be used independently of the game.
Limitations and future plans
In our observations, Fake Plots! is very entertaining (students playing it giggle a lot, reading the posts that appear on Glitter) and is not time-consuming to set up for teachers. But what are the limitations of the game? In terms of the equipment, students need to be connected to a device with internet access. With schools banning the use of smartphones and tablets, teachers who cannot rely on computer facilities may struggle.
In terms of the mechanics of the game, Glitter has an algorithm that rewards players who interact with textbook conspiracy posts that teachers can input using QR codes. If teachers want to use their own material and input news items and updates manually, and this may be necessary due to the need to update cultural references, the algorithm won’t be able to distinguish textbook conspiracy posts from mediocre ones and thus the difference won’t appear in the scores. But in our experience students tend to be excellent at coming up with textbook conspiracy posts themselves! And those can inspire the discussion in groups and as a class.
Another observation is that the competitive stage may seem relatively short but there are some good reasons to keep it contained. First, students are used to online interactions and tend to type and reply to posts very fast, which means that the social media platform can get very busy and difficult to monitor if large groups are involved. Second, younger students can get distracted and digress in their posts if attention is not brought back to the news item.
At the moment, versions of the game including kit, instructions, and QR codes are only available in English, Italian, and Spanish. We would like the game to be available in other languages as well, so if you are keen to help us develop the game in another language, let us know.
Currently, we do see some progress in the students who play the game in terms of their capacity to identify key factors in the spreading of misinformation and conspiracy theories. However, we have no evidence that playing the game makes students more skilled at navigating social media platforms “in the wild.” We have teamed up with psychologists who work on conspiracy theories and have experience in developing school interventions, and we hope we will get the funding to test the efficacy of this game as an inoculation strategy against misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Lisa Bortolotti
Lisa Bortolotti is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and she works in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences. She is the founder of The Philosophy Garden, supported by the University of Birmingham AHRC Impact Acceleration Account.
Anna Ichino
Anna Ichino is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Milan and she works mainly in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology. She is one of the founders and current project manager of the Philosophy Museum in Milan.
