Like a “Fed up“which growls louder and louder in confined homes, the French, after a too unpredictable year, are wary.
Whether with the media, the government, or the scientific world, how to restore confidence?
A PREDICTABLE FINDING
Anne-Sophie Novel, journalist and author of The media, the world and us, has been interested for several years in our relationship to information.
The period we are going through only confirms its five years of investigation: “there were warning signs of distrust“.
Various recent events have accentuated this observation. Like the election of Trump in the United States, Brexit but also “in France […] where there is a certain number of violence, feelings that are expressed and with confinement […] that does not help things“.
For the journalist, “it’s time to take it all in hand“.
FROM DOUBT TO PLOT
Sebastian Dieguez is a neuroscience researcher at the Laboratory of Cognitive and Neurological Sciences of the University of Friborg.
He is a specialist in the mechanisms that lead to mistrust and conspiracy.
He wrote Total Bullshit !, a work that questions our relationship to the truth.
The current crisis of confidence is an interesting textbook case for the researcher. According to him “it’s a good time to try to assess how all these beliefs arise […] we can see new grounds for distrust emerging everywhere, which are called conspiracy theories, and which tend to aggregate into a very dynamic pattern.”
A DEFECT EXACERBATED BY THE CURRENT CRISIS?
It is complicated to know if French citizens are more distrustful of the system, with the Covid-19 pandemic, than before.
For Sebastian Dieguez, “ithere are reasons to think that it is a fundamental phenomenon that still exists in society and which tends to be highlighted during particular events“.
Despite everything, it is very complicated to know if there are more conspiracy theories or if they are only more visible in view of current events.
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