





You’re browsing social media absentmindedly (is there any other way?) and you notice your mom sharing what you believe is obvious misinformation. Maybe it’s an AI-generated video; maybe it’s a long debunked myth about vaccines; maybe it’s long-withheld information about Bigfoot.
You also know that you will be seeing your mom tomorrow for dinner and it will inevitably come up.
Is it worth addressing? Is it likely to sour your dinner with her? Is there a risk of spreading harmful misinformation? These are all relevant questions that many of us have to deal with. Some ways of dealing with these situations are more productive than others (13).
And you? How have you reacted to similar situations?
- Identifying Credible Sources of Health Information in Social Media: Principles and Attributes | National Academy of Medicine Perspectives | July 16, 2021
- Active Listening | StatPearls – NCBI Bookshelf | September 13, 2023
- The Role of “Active Listening” in Informal Helping Conversations: Impact on Perceptions of Listener Helpfulness, Sensitivity, and Supportiveness and Discloser Emotional Improvement | Western Journal of Communication | January 3, 2015
- Conversational receptiveness: Improving engagement with opposing views | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes | September 2020
- The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences | September 20, 2017
- A Shared Intentionality Account of Uniquely Human Social Bonding | Perspectives on Psychological Science | October 26, 2023
- Hierarchy of Evidence – Evidence-Based Practice in Health – UC Library Guides at University of Canberra | June 17, 2025
- How can we use the ‘science of stories’ to produce persuasive scientific stories? | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications | December 22, 2017
- Narrative Persuasion and Storytelling as Climate Communication Strategies | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science | August 22, 2017
- Family Communication Patterns and Difficult Family Conversations | Journal of Applied Communications Research | April 2, 2013
- How to Control Your Emotions During a Difficult Conversation | Harvard Business Review | December 1, 2017
- How to Stabilize Emotions in Difficult Conversations | Psychology Today Canada | November 1, 2022
- Our tips for conversations on polarizing topics | ScienceUpFirst | February 23, 2024
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