Cognitive and Emotional Responses to Russian State-Sponsored Media Narratives in International Audiences

Russia utilizes state-sponsored news media outlets, such as RT or Sputnik, to project antagonistic strategic narratives into targeted societies and perturb international audiences. While psychological responses to this conduct are frequently assumed, there is a lack of causal evidence demonstrating this. Using a transdisciplinary perspective, we...

Stemming the narrative Flow: The legal and psychological grounding for the European Unions’s ban on Russian state-sponsored media

On March 2nd, 2022, in response to malign and anti-Western narratives surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Council of the European Union legally banned two Russian state-sponsored media outlets, RT and Sputnik, within EU borders. The decision of the Council divided opinion. While the ban indeed limits the reach of these Russian ...

Evidence-based narratives in European research programming

The article introduces and exemplifies the approach of evidence-based narratives (EBN). The methodology is a product of co-design between policy-making and science, generating robust intelligence for evidence-based policy making in the Directorate General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission (DG RTD) under the condition of high...

Grey matters: Advancing a psychological effects-based approach to countering malign information influence

Hostile political actors frequently engage in malign information influence, projecting antagonistic strategic narratives in targeted societies to manipulate the information environment and distort the perceptions of the citizens. Research examining malign information influence is growing, but more attention could be given to its psychological...

Portrait of liberal chaos: RT’s antagonistic strategic narration about the Netherlands

Hostile political actors can use antagonistic strategic narration as a means of marring the image of targeted states in the international arena. The current article presents a content analysis of narratives about the Netherlands that were published by Russian state-sponsored media outlet RT between 2018 and 2020, capturing a period of heightened...

Mothers’ Perceptions of their Daughters’ Susceptibility to HPV-related Risk Factors: An Experimental Pretest Comparing Narrative and Statistical Risk Information

Background: In order to promote HPV-vaccination acceptability among mothers of invited girls, we developed a web-based, tailored intervention. This study reports on an experimental pretest for the component of this intervention targeting mothers’ perceptions of their daughters’ susceptibility towards HPV-related risk factors. Statistical versus...

Decision Making During a Crisis: the Interplay of Narratives and Statistical Information Before and After Crisis Communication

Decision-making during a crisis is affected by several sources of information and prior knowledge, such as factual (statistical) information, narratives of others, and real-time governmental messages. The present study investigated how two types of information (statistics and narratives) influence helping behavior after the occurrence of a...

Collective user experience: Community-driven story co-authoring in live events

Audio-visual narratives are becoming the most popular medium for information sharing and social storytelling around a live event. This paper explores the collective experience of users of an online creative storytelling ecosystem. The system provides an ideal platform to study community-driven story co-authoring helped by social networks and...

Experiments with the production of ShapeShifting Media: Summary findings from the project NM2 (New Millennium, New Media)

Summary results of the assessment of new tools for the generation of reconfigurable screen media (ShapeShifting media) and of eight experimental ShapeShifting screen media productions covering genres including news, documentary and drama, are presented from the project New Millennium, New Media. The new tools for creating interactive and...