🗞️ Numb to the Truth: How Trust in Media is Evolving with Gen Z
Comments, time-passing, not caring, and...mainstream news...??
This week on 24/Z the focus is on the truth…and the factors that dictate that truth for Gen Z. Our new poll results from 500+ Gen Z’ers land a shocking twist that helps us understand the state of truth in a deeper, more revealing manner.
📈 New Research
The secret digital behaviors of Gen Z (Business Insider)
Jigsaw - a Google subsidiary focused on threats to open societies - published new research after studying Gen Z’s online truth-seeking habits.
“Within a week of actual research, we just threw out the term information literacy," says Yasmin Green, Jigsaw's CEO.
The research, focused on a handful of interviews of 13-24 year-olds, found that most young people are approaching their digital experiences in what they called “timepass” mode, as seen below in the visual. They describe it as “light, obligation-free content”. Or as we called it, “numbing” behaviors.
The research found that Gen Z’ers in the study knew the difference between trusted news and AI-generated memes, but “they just don’t care”.
“What establishes the relevance of a claim isn't some established notion of authority. It's the social signals they get from their peers.”
One fascinating bit we noted from this research was that as “truth risks” grew increasingly personal, Gen Z’ers habits changed:
“And when it comes to things like diet or wellness, Gen Zers will just try it on their own bodies and see if it works. They perceive that as a safe way to do their own research, mostly because it's not hurting anyone else. If that new diet or exercise regimen "works" on their body, that's more believable than data showing its effects on a whole population.’
In our Ads to Z research in fall of 2022, we pinpointed this shift in trust from institution to community (the comment sections) and laid a prediction on experience as the next shift.
As fake and real become more indistinguishable, what people trust becomes more and more personal.
How search marketers can keep up with Gen Z (Reddit)
Another recent study on Gen Z’s pursuit of trust and truthfulness was recently released by Reddit. Gen Z heavily over-indexed against all social media users in believing social media to have fake (47% to 29%), biased (49% to 30%) or poor quality (36% to 24%) reviews/posters.
According to Reddit, Reddit is also the 3rd most trusted source for product research, with TikTok and Instagram notably trailing far behind.
The most notable missed observation from this research was the importance of anonymity as the reason for increased trust on Reddit. It is because there are no social signals at play, that allow Gen Z’ers to trust what they are seeing here so much.
🙂↕️ dcdx Gen Z research on truth and trustworthiness
We polled Gen Z’ers from our peer-to-peer network of 300,000+ Gen Z’ers to understand more about the biggest influence to them on believing if the news is trustworthy.
The results? They may shock you - and they seem to contradict the other studies.
58% of Gen Z’ers said if something is published by mainstream news, that has the strongest influence on them believing it is trustworthy. That is over their friends posting about it (10%), what comment sections say about it (16%), and 16% not thinking about it at all.
🧠 why?
With so many sources of information out there, it’s no wonder Gen Z’s information journey is complicated, involving bounces between multiple sources on and offline, including their own personal experiences.
So why is the notoriously anti-trusting of institutions generation all of a sudden shifting their trust to…institutions, ie “mainstream news”?
As what we trust becomes more and more personal, it also increases the burden it places on our own selves for truth-seeking. Whether it’s vetting the comment sections, going to a subreddit, or having to experience it ourselves to believe it, there is a higher and higher burden that is placed on our ability to identify and parse out the truth.
As Chip and Dan Heath say in their work “Switch”, perhaps what looks like laziness (ie “they just don’t care”) is actually exhaustion.
In a world of information overload, the search for truth is tiring.
So it seems Gen Z’ers are left with two options:
Give up on trying
Default to the simplest path - the path of mainstream news and institutions.
🗃️ More on Gen Z and trustworthiness
Gen Z News Consumption — AdAge
“With social media creating echo chambers based on biases and algorithms, trusted news sources help Gen Z distinguish news from misinformation and algorithmic bias.”
Younger Americans are More Optimistic than Older Americans About the Potential of AI to Help Manage Money (Northwestern Mutual)
More than half of Gen Z’ers (57%) and Millennials (55%) say they are excited about the impact AI and generative AI (GenAI) tools could have on their financial lives
We’ll be back after the 4th for our next edition - have a lovely short week next week to all celebrating!