The Information Deficit Model and the Death of the Factsheet
The ‘information deficit model‘ assumes that when a person’s beliefs and attitudes, and consequently their behaviours, are not ‘rational’ or in line with what we would like, this is because of a lack of understanding caused by a lack of information. Consequently, the information deficit model assumes that people are rational actors who will change their views based on the best information available to them. Quite apart from the fact that this is intuitively untrue, the information deficit model has…