In this month’s Educate Against Hate blog we hear from a London based Prevent Education Officer, on how understanding human psychology can help build resilience to online influences in young people.
I have spent the last 9 years working as a Prevent Education Officer delivering workshops in schools to help young people build resilience to radicalisation, extremism and harmful online influences. Alongside this I am also a practicing psychotherapist. Both are fundamentally about understanding how people think, how beliefs are formed, and what influences the choices we make.
Working across both fields has left me increasingly fascinated by the psychology of influence. As a psychotherapist, I explore how our emotions, experiences and cognitive biases shape the way we interpret the world. Through my Prevent work, I’ve seen how misinformation, conspiracy theories and extremist narratives can exploit those same psychological processes.
During my time in Prevent I have seen how much technology has had an impact on the young people we support. Increasingly this seems to require us to understand two things simultaneously: the psychology of the human mind and the psychology of the platforms we use every day.
Algorithms are designed to learn from our behaviour and recommend content that is most likely to keep us engaged. Our brains, meanwhile, rely on cognitive shortcuts that help us make sense of an overwhelming amount of information. One of these is confirmation bias—the tendency to notice, remember and give greater weight to information that aligns with our existing beliefs or expectations. When we are given more of the same content, we may be more inclined to view it as credible or representative, particularly when it aligns with our existing beliefs-
When sophisticated recommendation systems interact with perfectly normal human cognitive biases, the effects can be surprisingly impactful. The information we encounter becomes increasingly personalised, while our own minds naturally gravitate towards information that feels familiar, emotionally resonant or validating.
Scarlett Addison – Security and Crime Science Student from UCL and previously a Prevent Intern at Lambeth Council has developed, EAH workshop style lessons which are not designed to tell young people what to think, but to help them understand how information reaches them, why certain content feels persuasive, and what they can do to become more thoughtful, critical and psychologically aware digital citizens.
Designed for delivery in tutorial time, citizenship, RSHE or pastoral interventions, the workshops cover:
- Fake news and how to spot it – exploring misinformation, emotional manipulation and practical strategies for evaluating online information.
- User-generated content vs journalism – understanding the differences in purpose, accountability, evidence and credibility between social media creators and professional journalism.
- Algorithms and confirmation bias – examining how recommendation systems interact with our natural cognitive biases to shape the information we consume and the beliefs we develop.
You can access the full suite of resources including teaching materials and lesson plans here.
For further guidance and classroom resources on this topic, follow the links below: