Zone-flooding, public confusion, and Signal Detection Theory: A theoretical framework and empirical investigation

While historically, the aim of propaganda was to convince the public of a certain agenda, many political commentators contend that modern forms of disinformation come with a different goal in mind: To confuse, rather than convince. It is believed that to secure this goal, informational spaces are diluted, rather than dominated, a strategy termed “zone-flooding”. The present research provides a unified psychological account of confusion that draws on methods from Signal Detection Theory and metacognition, to examine the public’s object-level ability to discern truth from falsehood and accurate metacognitive insight into that distinction. In two preregistered studies, including one Registered Report, we presented national samples of citizens (study 1, Germany: n = 1,570; study 2, USA: n = 1,891) with true-only, false-only (“classical propaganda”) or noisy (“zone-flooding”) information about climate change in the form of tweets. Across both studies, across various operationalizations of zone-flooding (e.g, targeting the political left vs. right; different numbers of tweets), and against various baselines (politically equated vs. ecologically valid tweets), we find no empirical evidence for the notion that zone-flooding causes confusion. The present work lays the theoretical basis for a psychology of zone-flooding and public confusion within one coherent theoretical and methodological framework.