I’m enjoying the first day of a conference on hybrid warfare and negotiation theory at the lovely Vlerick business school in Ghent, Belgium and will share a few presentations as I get them. This conference is part of Project Seshat, building on the conference we hosted at Cardozo last fall (articles forthcoming soon). This morning’s presentation was on disinformation—courtesy of Kamil Mikulski, an expert in disinformation campaigns for the EU and NATO.
Why does this matter for negotiation? I am focusing on the bottom of of the ladder of inference—the data we “see” or “hear” and then how we select information for moving forward—how do our partisan perceptions impact our negotiations when the information itself is questionable?
So here are the definitions that I found fascinating: misinformation (not necessarily harmful intent but wrong—i.e. well-meaning but incorrect beliefs on mask wearing during Covid); malinformation (correct information used for bad intent—i.e. weaponizing a random crime against all immigrants); and disinformation (incorrect information with the intent to deceive to political or financial gain and/or to create havoc—i.e. Russia’s narrative that Ukrainian grain was not making it to needy countries because the West was blockading/using ports to import weapons to the Ukraine)
Finally, business school professor (at Lyon France) and negotiation guru Adrian Borbely talked about how disinformation campaigns can attack at all levels of the ladder—the data at the bottom, by priming our reasoning, and by presenting conclusions as fact.
Fascinating stuff—and looking forward to more….
I think it’s important to appreciate that most misinformation is not coming from a place of ill intent or even an intent to mislead. I’ve been doing work to help the dispute resolution field have ways to notice and update incorrect and/or inadvertently discriminatory guidance, which I wrote about in a 2022 article for CPR’s Alternatives (a version of it is available at https://bit.ly/VetGuidance).
As a practical matter, it can be hard to verify if malinformation or disinformation are happening because of the challenges assessing and proving intent. In my advocacy work seeking that people change guidance that recommends mental illness discrimination, I find it best to always treat the problem as one that was unintentional rather than argue about the person’s intent. So I frame it as “inadvertent discrimination” (fitting the misinformation definition). There are times where it seems clear people may have had self-interested motives behind it – such as personal profits – but I don’t think it is productive to fight about intent.
I’m not sure if it could work on a larger scale but I do think if we can shift our efforts away from trying to prove someone’s intent, and toward framing any solution as a collaborative effort to get onto the same page together in a world filled with flawed information – we’d have an easier time normalizing the critical consumption of information and the communication it takes to get past confusing disconnects that come from problematic information. Sort of an “it’s nobody’s fault but all of our responsibility” mentality. And a, “it can happen to any of us, nothing to be defensive about to consider updating this” mentality as well.
This is fascinating, Andrea. Thank you for sharing and I look forward to hearing more.