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Trust is a foundational element of human society, crucial for effective communication, the formation of public opinion, and the functioning of communities. This thesis explores the complex dynamics of trust, distrust, and mistrust in the context of Digital Influence Warfare (DIW), a modern phenomenon where social media becomes a battleground for information dissemination and manipulation during conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Palestine. By examining how trust influences the acceptance and rejection of information on popular social media platforms, this research sheds light on the interplay between trust and digital influence. DIW employs various tools and tactics to achieve its goals, with trust acting as both a target and a weapon. For instance, influencers, specifically War Bloggers, play a pivotal role in shaping public perception. This study posits that trust in war bloggers is primarily based on perceived expertise, idea based on the concept of Trustworthiness, making them influential figures in contemporary conflict reporting. Another key aspect is the role of memes, specifically Instagram Reels and TikTok, which utilise affect-based trust to provoke immediate emotional reactions, thereby enhancing user’s vulnerability for a more effective trust-building process. AI-generated content represents a significant threat in DIW, as it exploits heuristic-based trust, where people rely on cognitive shortcuts to assess information credibility. This can lead to widespread misinformation and increased societal mistrust. The thesis examines why individuals are prone to trusting altered digital content and the implications of this trend for social cohesion. The research also delves into the tactics of trolls and bots, which flood social media with narratives and create illusions of massive support or opposition. These tactics exploit identification-based trust, which is specifically highlighted in the context of DIW. They manipulate social identity and in-group/out

What is it about our current digital technologies that seemingly makes it difficult for users to attend to what matters to them? According to the dominant narrative in the literature on the "attention economy,"a user's lack of attention is due to the large amounts of information available in their everyday environments. I will argue that information-abundance fails to account for some of the central manifestations of distraction, such as sudden urges to check a particular information-source in the absence of perceptual information. I will use active inference, and in particular models of action selection based on the minimization of expected free energy, to develop an alternative answer to the question about what makes it difficult to attend. Besides obvious adversarial forms of inference, in which algorithms build up models of users in order to keep them scrolling, I will show that active inference provides the tools to identify a number of problematic structural features of current digital technologies: they contain limitless sources of novelty, they can be navigated by very simple and effortless motor movements, and they offer their action possibilities everywhere and anytime independent of place or context. Moreover, recent models of motivated control show an intricate interplay between motivation and control that can explain sudden transitions in motivational state and the consequent alteration of the salience of actions. I conclude, therefore, that the challenges users encounter when engaging with digital technologies are less about information overload or inviting content, but more about the continuous availability of easily available possibilities for action.

Introduction Mild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning (MID/BIF) are common in people with severe mental health problems (SMHP). Despite this, there is a lack of treatments adapted for this group of clients. Methods This qualitative study describes the development of a new intervention, guided by the principles of action research, for people with SMHP and MID/BIF and mental health professionals to help them talk about all aspects of the process of recovery. The intervention was developed in four cycles and in close cooperation with mental health professionals, experts by experience, other experts in the field of SMHP or MID/BIF, and clients. During all cycles there was a strong focus on the content of the intervention, exercises, understandable language, and drawings for visual support. Results This resulted in the intervention “Routes to Recovery,” which covers both complaints and strengths, coping strategies, helpful (social) activities, and how to determine future steps in a recovery plan. Discussion Routes to Recovery is a first step in helping professionals and their clients with SMHP and MID/BIF to have a conversation about personal strengths and what the client needs to recover. Future research should investigate the effects of this intervention.

The ecological approach to psychology has been a main antecedent of embodied and situated approaches to cognition. The concept of affordances in particular has gained currency throughout psychological science. Yet, contemporary ecological psychology has seemed inaccessible to outsiders and protective of its legacy. Indeed, some prominent ecological psychologists have presented their approach as a "package deal"-a principled and unified perspective on perception and action. Looking at the history of the field, however, we argue that ecological psychology has developed in rich and pluriform ways. Aiming to open the field to critical engagement and productive exchange, we identify three major strands of thought within ecological psychology, each of which emerged in the 20 years after Gibson's death: physical, biological, and social ecological psychology. Each of these strands develop ecological ideas in quite different directions, making different use of some of its central concepts, adopting different explanatory principles, and embodying different philosophical worldviews. Proponents of the ecological approach have been arguing for pluralism within cognitive science to make room for ecological psychology. Given the diversity of the strands, we extend this plea to within ecological psychology itself; the field is better off aiming for a productive pluralism in which the different strands are in dialogue with each other. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

In this response to Rietveld’s inaugural lecture, we exemplify with one of our design cases for project Expedition RWS 2050, how Rietveld’s and our method are complementary. Within this project, RWS invited us to contribute our design skills and make relevant future scenarios experienceable. To scaffold imaginative discussions about everyday life in 2050 with a cross-section of the Dutch population, we wrote seven short speculative stories and designed a set of physical discussion tools. When looking at this design case and the cases Rietveld describes in his inaugural lecture, one can see that we both are guided by and contributing to the development of ecological and enactive philosophy, which rejects the dichotomy between sensorimotor and higher cognition. In his approach, Rietveld pushes the boundaries of the affordances of the material during the making process, whereas we predominantly investigate the affordances of the things and practices which we have designed. Despite these differences, we are both pursuing engagement with philosophical practice through non-discursive means while imagining new sociomaterial practices.

Smartphone use plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Philosophical research that has used first-wave or second-wave theories of extended cognition in order to understand our engagement with digital technologies has focused on the contribution of these technologies to the completion of specific cognitive tasks (e.g., remembering, reasoning, problem-solving, navigation). However, in a considerable number of cases, everyday smartphone use is either task-unrelated or task-free. In psychological research, these cases have been captured by notions such as absent-minded smartphone use (Marty-Dugas et al., 2018) or smartphone-related inattentiveness (Liebherr et al., 2020). Given the prevalence of these cases, we develop a conceptual framework that can accommodate the functional and phenomenological characteristics of task-unrelated or task-free smartphone use. To this end, we will integrate research on second-wave extended cognition with mind-wandering research and introduce the concept of ‘extended mind-wandering’. Elaborating the family resemblances approach to mind-wandering (Seli, Kane, Smallwood, et al., 2018), we will argue that task-unrelated or task-free smartphone use shares many characteristics with mind-wandering. We will suggest that an empirically informed conceptual analysis of cases of extended mind-wandering can enrich current work on digitally extended cognition by specifying the influence of the attention economy on our cognitive dynamics.

We follow up on a prominent line of work in which principles of embodied cognition are employed to not only account for skilled coping but also for more intellectual activities such as remembering and imagination. Imagination then, is not a reflective activity an individual does by herself, but a shared and embodied activity scaffolded by tangible design. We present a case study in which we designed a toolkit to facilitate imagining the Netherlands in 2050. We wrote speculative stories of people living in 2050 and designed an assortment of objects. We held several workshops to use the toolkit for shared imagination for our client, Rijkswaterstaat. We analyze how, in the context of the workshops, the stories and objects provided affordances for shared imagination. We thereby hope to have demonstrated that it is possible to design for more intellectual activities in a tangible and embodied way.