In the new world of future leaders living wholly in the space of the Internet, it is essential to understand what cognitive instruments are used when “authoritative” sources are gone. The project will use focus groups from among future leaders in a cross-cultural study of graduating students in the three most important universities in Russia and in two American universities, to learn what heuristics individuals use to determine issues of reliability, self-isolation (visiting only those sites with which one agrees and thus narrowing viewpoint diversity), trust, and images of certain countries of the world. This deeper, individual-level interaction with the Internet is not available in the research literature, which tends to focus on patterns of site-visiting and other aggregate data. In contradistinction, this research project will provide insight into how active users process online information, and the cognitive strategies of their own creation concerning principally news and information.

Ellen Mickiewicz is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy Studies at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is a renowned specialist on media and politics, especially in the former Soviet Union and Eastern/Central Europe, she is also a fellow of The Carter Center and had been Lombard Visiting Professor at Harvard University.